Deep Dive: Labour’s Immigration Crackdown Is Hurting Britain - and Won’t Win Them Votes

An 80% drop in migration is deepening crises in care, housing and higher education - while Reform voters remain unmoved and Labour’s base drifts away

Yesterday on BlueSky, I was admonished for being critical of the immigration policies of the Labour government. The admonishment kicked off with an “it’s all very emotive” little patronising jab, before moving on to explaining how all of this is terribly necessary because we just don’t have the housing, infrastructure or police to handle all these people, don’t I know?

The first thing to point out is that yes, it is indeed a very emotive subject. For the past sixteen odd years, migrants to this country (like me) have been lovely little easy scapegoats to point at when things go wrong, so things tend to get a bit… tense.

But fine.

Let’s me attempt to do the sober, grown-up thing, take the feeling out of the subject, put the outrage on a shelf for five minutes and look at what the numbers actually tell us.

What the UK has done since 2024 has not been a modest recalibration of the immigration system. It has not been a case of “bringing things under control” in any sort of neat, technocratic sense. It has been one of the sharpest reversals in migration policy the country has seen in modern times. Net migration has fallen from 944,000 in the year to March 2023 to 204,000 by June 2025.

Source: ONS Long International Migration Provisional: year ending June 2025

That is a fall of roughly 720,000 people in two years, which in percentage terms is about an 80% collapse.

This has happened because governments, both Labour and Tory, have made a series of conscious decisions, one after another, all designed to narrow the routes in, make them more expensive, make them harder to use, and make life more precarious for the people already here.

Salary thresholds were pushed up from £26,200 to £38,700 and then higher again to £41,700. Student dependants were heavily restricted. The care worker route was first constrained and then effectively shut to new overseas applicants. Skills thresholds were raised to degree level. The route to settlement will now be extended from five years to ten for most migrants - and this will be done retrospectively, affecting around 2.2 million people already living in the UK.

Taken together, these are not isolated tweaks, but rather a system-wide political choice. The point was to drag the headline number down, and on that narrow measure the policy has worked.

The problem is that “the headline number” is not a thing floating abstractly in space. It is made up of actual people doing actual jobs in actual sectors, and when you remove them at speed, those sectors do not politely adapt overnight.

They buckle.

One of the most obvious places this impact is seen is in social care, where the numbers are genuinely startling. In 2023, the UK granted 107,847 visas in the caring personal service category. By last year, that had fallen to 3,178. That, according to my calculator of consequence, is a 97% collapse in two years. In the final quarter of 2025, only 23 foreign care workers were admitted.

Twenty-three.

In a country of nearly 70 million people, with a rapidly ageing population and a social care sector that has been underpaid, understaffed and permanently one bad winter away from panic for years.

The point here is not that care should rely forever on low-paid migrant labour. Of course it shouldn’t.

A sane, responsible country would improve pay, status, training and conditions so that more domestic workers actually want to stay in the sector. Did that happen here?

Of course it bloody didn’t.

We did not rebuild the labour market underneath care before kicking away one of its main props. We simply removed a huge portion of the recruitment pipeline and then acted surprised that the consequences might be unpleasant. Around a quarter of the adult social care workforce was non-British in 2024. When you shut off inflows into a sector like that, the result is not a morally satisfying rebalancing. It is, on the ground, more unfilled shifts, more provider strain, more delayed care packages, more pressure on unpaid family carers, and more people stuck in hospital because there is no support package available to get them home.

That in turn feeds straight into the NHS, because the NHS and social care are not separate planets. They are intrinsically linked by discharge, by staffing, by patient flow, by the basic fact that a person who cannot be cared for safely at home will inevitably end up in a hospital bed instead.

The NHS has been dependent on international labour for years, not because of some ideological fetish for globalism, but because the service would quite literally struggle to function without it. More than 17% of NHS staff are from overseas, and for nurses that figure is close to 27%. Yet overseas nurse entries have fallen from 26,100 in 2022 to just 1,777 in 2025 - a precipitous 93% drop.

While this has been happening a report called Unreciprocated Care found that 42% of internationally educated nursing staff are now considering leaving the UK, with many looking to go on to Australia, Canada or New Zealand.

So the country has managed to create what might politely be called the worst of both worlds. New recruitment is drying up, while a significant chunk of the workforce already here is looking at the political climate, the pay, the conditions and the visa rules and thinking, quite reasonably, “abso-fucking-lutely not.”

I simply cannot overstate how self-defeating that is. You do not strengthen a workforce by making yourself less attractive to the people who currently keep it afloat. You just create a slow-moving staffing crisis and then act terribly mystified when waiting lists, ward pressures and burnout continue to worsen.

Outside of health and social care, the university sector is also experiencing the impacts of the rapid drop in inward migration.

International students have long been treated in public debate as though they are a sort of optional extra, a decorative flourish on top of British higher education.

They are not.

They are one of the main ways the entire system has kept itself financially afloat.

International students pay significantly higher tuition fees than home students, and those fees do not just fund their own education - they cross-subsidise research, departments, staffing and, pretty crucially, the viability of many institutions.

So when policy changes cause that pipeline to shrink, the consequences are immediate. International student numbers fell 6% in the 2024/25 academic year. EU student numbers fell a further 16%. The restriction on student dependants alone led to an 86% fall in that category, amounting to 105,000 fewer people.

Again, none of this is especially mysterious or even unexpected.

If you, through policy decisions, make the UK a less attractive place to study, fewer people will come.

If fewer people come, universities lose fee income.

If universities lose fee income in a system already hammered by years of frozen domestic tuition fees and real-terms cuts, they start running deficits.

That means course closures, hiring freezes, staff redundancies, cuts to student support, reduced research capacity and a general hollowing out of one of the few sectors in which Britain still has serious international pull. And all of that is being inflicted by policies ostensibly designed to look “tough” on migration, rather than to reform higher education itself - a spectacular self-own.

We also need to take serious consideration of the broader economy, which is where the debate becomes less cultural and more mechanical.

Migrants, despite what Nigel Farage/Shabana Mahmoud want you to believe, are not just a talking point on a panel show - many are of working age, pay taxes, spend money, rent homes, fill vacancies and contribute to economic activity long before they draw significantly on pensions or age-related services.

Lower migration, especially lower working-age migration, means lower tax receipts and a smaller labour force. The Office for Budget Responsibility has modelled that if net migration is 200,000 a year lower than forecast, borrowing could be roughly £20 billion higher by the end of the decade. Oxford Economics has estimated that the cumulative effect of lower immigration could leave the UK population 1.5 million lower by 2030 than previously projected, with output also below earlier expectations.

This last point is pretty pertinent, because Britain is not a youthful, high-productivity economy sitting on endless spare labour.

It is an ageing country with weak productivity, stubborn labour shortages in multiple sectors, anaemic growth and public finances that are already under strain. Reducing migration sharply in that context does not simply alter the demographic composition of newcomers, it changes the size of the workforce on which future tax revenues depend. It narrows the base at the precise moment the demands on the state are becoming more expensive.

The impact of this?

Health costs rise.

Pension liabilities rise.

Social care demand rises.

The number of working-age people contributing to pay for all that becomes even more important. So when politicians speak glibly about bringing the numbers down, what they are often really talking about is making a conscious choice of accepting weaker growth, tighter public finances and a smaller pool of taxpayers to fund an older society.

And older really is the key word here.

One of the most consequential facts in the whole report is not the migration figure itself, but the demographic trajectory behind it. From this year onwards, deaths are expected to outnumber births in the UK, or in other even more chilling words, natural change turns negative.

In this context migration is no longer simply one part of population growth, but the thing holding overall population stability together.

This alone should radically alter how serious people talk about the issue, because if the country is not replacing itself through births, then working-age migration is not an optional add-on to economic life, but an integral part of how the economy keeps functioning at all. It supports the labour market, the tax base, the housing market, public services and long-term demand.

Yet instead of discussing that honestly, large parts of the political class still talk as if reducing migration is a cost-free expression of “control.” It is not - it is, above all, a trade-off. And increasingly, it is a trade-off Britain looks poorly equipped to make, one that leaves the foundations of the economy looking increasingly like they’re built on sand.

And nowhere is that contradiction more obvious than in housing - the very issue so often used to justify these policies in the first place. We do not have the homes, people say. We cannot build fast enough. Immigration must come down because “the country is full”. This is one of those arguments that sounds superficially sensible until you look at how the housing system in this country actually works.

Yes, population growth affects housing demand.

Obviously it does - more people need more homes. That is not controversial.

The idea, though, that reducing migration sharply solves the housing crisis is absurdly simplistic, because the housing crisis in Britain was not created by migrants and will not be fixed by making fewer of them arrive.

We find ourselves where we are on the back of decades of underbuilding, planning dysfunction, speculative incentives, regional inequality, weak infrastructure coordination, and a political class terrified of offending existing homeowners. Migrants did not invent restrictive planning policy, gut social housing, or decide that property speculation should become half the country’s retirement strategy.

And there is an additional wrinkle here that makes the whole thing even more idiotic. The government wants to build 1.5 million homes over this parliament. To achieve this, the construction sector is estimated to need somewhere in the region of 225,000 to 240,000 additional workers by 2027.

So while ministers and pundits are busy telling everyone that immigration has to fall because of housing pressures, the very same country is short of the builders, tradespeople and labour needed to deliver the homes that would ease those pressures. It is a policy loop worthy of a farce. We cannot have the houses because there are too many people, but we also cannot build the houses because we do not have enough people to build them.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere too. Hospitality has more than 132,000 vacancies, yet key roles were excluded from the new shortage arrangements. Tech visa applications have fallen significantly, with warnings that the UK risks falling further behind in global advancements.

Construction needs workers. Care needs workers. Universities need students. The NHS needs staff. The broader economy needs taxpayers. And the political system has responded by narrowing routes into the country while pretending the effects will somehow remain neatly contained inside a Home Office spreadsheet with no apparent real-world impact.

They won’t.

Which is why the politics of this are so maddening. Because it would be disingenuous to say that this is all happening in a vacuum of pure evidence-based administration - this is almost exclusively about Labour trying to neutralise the electoral threat from Reform UK by sounding harder, looking tougher and pushing the numbers down fast enough to reassure nervous voters and hostile papers.

The problem is that it is a terrible calculation. Utterly idiotic.

Reform voters are never going to look at Labour taking an already restrictive framework and making it harsher, then suddenly decide that actually Keir Starmer is their man. They are not hunting for a competent centre-left version of anti-immigration politics.

They want the original, full fat, full sugar product, and whenever Labour moves in their direction, the demand simply escalates again.

The numbers are never low enough.

The rhetoric is never hard enough.

The targets just move.

Which is exactly how the populist right works. Appeasing it does not neutralise it, all it achieves is validating its framing and then leaves you chasing after a constituency that was never yours in the first place.

Meanwhile, Labour risks alienating exactly the voters, like me, who did expect something better: people who are not blind to pressures on housing or services, but who also understand that blaming migrants for decades of domestic policy failure is dishonest and destructive.

Those voters do not necessarily all stay home, but many of them do start looking elsewhere, and the obvious beneficiary of that drift is not Reform - it’s the Greens under Zack Polanski, who can occupy the ground Labour is vacating without having to own the economic and institutional fallout of these choices.

The Greens, meanwhile, can position themselves as the party that takes climate action, social justice and public service investment seriously without resorting to xenophobic scapegoating. They can advocate for sensible immigration policy and point out the damage being done to care, universities and the NHS - all without having to manage the consequences of the system Labour is implementing.

They are not the ones trying to fill care rotas, balance university budgets or staff hospital wards. They get to be right without having to be responsible - a structural advantage Labour is handing them on a plate.

Labour, by contrast, ends up wearing every service failure, every strike, every delayed discharge and course closure, while the Greens offer moral clarity from a distance and pick up disillusioned voters.

So the political genius of the strategy is this: Labour drives migration down, intensifies pressure across key sectors, owns the fallout in government - and still fails to win over the voters it was trying to appease while actively alienating their own voting base.

It is a losing strategy on both the substance and the politics - a truly rare double achievement.

To bring this to a close is the point that seems to gets lost whenever someone smugly tells you to be less “emotive” about all this.

The numbers do not become less damning when you strip out the humanity. Quite the opposite. Once you focus purely on the facts, what comes to light is not a sensible course correction, or even a “some people will be in the crossfire”, but a profoundly short-sighted act of political management.

Our political leadership has engineered a huge fall in migration in an ageing economy that depends on working-age labour, while public services are strained, universities are wobbling, construction is short of workers, and the housing crisis remains fundamentally home-grown.

Immigration is an emotive subject. It always will be, because it is about people, identity, fairness, belonging, and because people like me have spent years being used as a sort of all-purpose explanation for everything Britain cannot be bothered to fix properly.

Even if you remove all of that, though, even if you insist on viewing this through the coldest possible lens, the most logical stance you can muster, the conclusion is still the same.

This is not clever politics.

It is not clever economics.

It is not clever statecraft.

It is just an utterly idiotic way to run a country.