A large majority of UK voters believe immigration is increasing despite sharp falls in the number of people entering the UK, according to exclusive polling shared with the Guardian.
Voters also say they have no confidence in the government’s ability to control the UK’s borders, according to the poll by More in Common. The results will come as a blow to Keir Starmer’s administration, which has taken an increasingly hardline stance on immigration in recent months.
Net migration to the UK fell by more than two-thirds to a post-pandemic low in the year ending June 2025, but 67% of the people polled thought it had increased. Among Reform voters, four in five thought immigration had grown, and more than three in five (63%) believed it had “increased significantly”.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, promised “the most substantial reform to the UK’s asylum system in a generation” in November, and proposed a series of hardline policies to make the UK less attractive to migrants and refugees.
And a propaganda problem.
Which is THE main reason why the nationalism problem has been allowed to grow this big.
An elderly person I know got it in their head that the people coming across the Channel in boats were a serious problem.
“Thirty thousand a year!” they complained. “It’s an invasion!”
So I said “The population of Britain is 70 million people. At 40,000 a year for the next 25 years, ignoring all other increases in population by people already here, do you know what the population would be? 71 million. You don’t need to worry about it. And stop talking about an invasion. If it was an invasion, they’d have guns and we’d shoot them first. Most of them are trying to get away from guns.”
(This is not to say that there isn’t a heavy humanitarian and financial burden involved with dealing with those people, only that it’s not the problem some people think (or want us to believe) it is.)
“But they don’t live like we do.”
“I don’t live like you do. I eat foods you won’t touch and spend all my life on a computer. Where are you going to deport me to?”
Either I’m getting through to them or they know not to bring it up around me any more.
“I don’t live like you do. I eat foods you won’t touch and spend all my life on a computer. Where are you going to deport me to?”
I’m sending you back to the I.R.C! 🤓
As long as it’s not Kekistan.
The power of disinformation when the people in charge of setting the record straight (the government and media) are either incapable, unwilling, or both.
Who is in charge of that?
…do you suffer from a condition that makes you unable to read text inside of parentheses?
See also: actual nonpolitical experts in related fields. Their input is usually ignored by the aforementioned governments and media cretins whenever there’s a conflict with their chosen narrative, though.
I was asking to see if you’d clarify. I didn’t realize that this was who was responsible for setting the record straight. I would have said citizens bare that responsibility. But I guess we just watch and hope our government does it.
Mostly due to misinformation on X - Elons misinformation machine.
I don’t know about mostly - I think there’s just as much damage being done by propaganda on Facebook, in the Daily Mail, and broadcast on GB News.
It’s very concerning, as an American, to see the rise of xenophobia in countries that are generally better educated than the US.
Every country has idiots in them, social media just made it easier for them to band together
From the gereration of “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” comes “I read it in a post on Facebook your racist uncle shared, so it’s totally true!”
FWIW it’s kinda coming from the American far right
Elon paid for, fascist pipsqueak, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s legal fees when he got locked up for assaulting a pensioner.
There’s a shitload of dark money that arrived into our current far right party du jour via crypto, almost the exact same instant Elon publicly said something in support of them (funding of British political parties by foreign nationals is illegal)
Twitter is still used by a lot of people in this country for some godawful reason.
We also voted for Brexit remember, we have a lot of homegrown morons here too
I would hope better educated populations would make their political decisions based on something other than the flow of money, though.
The scary part to me is how many of these asshole fascists are able to convince millions of people in some of the best educated countries that they are right on every issue, when they are quire literally wrong, and easily provably wrong at that, on every single issue.
Populations in the West aren’t taught enough how to navigate the political and capitalist climate to cut through all the bullshit, and it’s showing with the rampant rise of fascism across the West.
They don’t make their decisions based on that directly, the money pays for propaganda. Given the ultra rich are now pretty clearly the root of most modern day problems we’re facing, it’s in their interest to spend any amount they can to ensure people lay the blame on people less fortunate, rather than sharpening the guillotine blade.
A lot of people bought into Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberal bootstraps bullshit, hook, line and sinker. Those people all believe success means you must have worked hard and been smart. The reality that everyone in the class of “successful” to them, is successful due to intentional or unintentional nepotism.
This is why they look to people like Musk and Trump as authority, they truly believe they actually did something virtuous to end up where they are and therefore have anything of value to say. This is rather than the reality where they simply won the birth lottery and decided to also be spiteful, unlikable assholes filled with contempt.
Brave of you to assume we’re any better educated.
Nigel Farage has got them to think this way.
I keep reading about his severely racist past and can’t figure out how he’s still around.
Because racists like him.
Yeah, a LOT of racists love his severely racist present and have high hopes for his severely racist future.
Do these people even know how difficult it is to immigrate to another country?
They seem to believe it’s just a quick application, jump on the next plane and boom, now you’re sucking all the money out of the government budget living like a king.
Betcha that 67% also voted for Brexit.
Idjits gotta idjit.
Why would anyone in their sane mind want to migrate to fucking Albion? At this point it’s almost as much of a shithole as the USA…
maybe it has something to do with all the people who immigrated since 2015 and have 3 times more kids than the average british people?
Got data to back that up or is it just what you ‘think’?
Much of the post-Brexit rise in net migration is accounted for by people arriving from areas with higher fertility rates, such as Southern Asian and Western African communities. At the same time, EU nationals—who in 2021 had lower fertility rates than the UK-born (Figure 4)—have been leaving the country in greater numbers than they are arriving. This shift means that migrants will account for a larger share of births, even if fertility rates within each nationality remain stable or decline.
Maybe you should try and stop the exodus of EU nationals instead of blaming immigrants.
Nice try, but they just want an excuse to be racist. They won’t care about facts.
I gotta try. ¯(ツ)/¯
If you take a second to think about it, this poll makes sense. Your average Brit is having less kids than immigrants on top of the new immigrant arrivals annually. Every year, the demographics shifts more and more, and therefore it feels like the number of immigrants is growing even when it’s technically not the case.
One of the biggest reasons why I’ve always hated the Guardian is because they always pump these grand sounding articles with very strong slants, but conveniently keep out the most plausible explanations that pushes back against them. When the polling shows that 60-70% of the country think this way, you can no longer just chalk it up to “hurr durr people are dumb”, it clearly signifies something more substantive is happening.
Nothing I’ve seen the last several years invalidates the “people are dumb” argument.
It’s a meaningless statement because people are always stupid. You can’t infer anything of value from something like that. When you get opinion shifts in demographics this big, it represents a real world change that’s affecting people’s lives negatively. In this case the piss poor economy is causing people to stress and they’re blaming it on immigrants due to the changing demographics.
Good point, well made.
So how is birth rate vs immigration rate? You got some numbers right?
I’m not sure what you’re asking for exactly. My point is that the demographics of the country continue shifting every year, and this shift is visible on the ground. A lot of people are viewing this shift as an increase in immigration, even though immigration rates are technically down. If you want numbers, literally any chart that shows UK ethnic and religious demographics over the years will show this to be the case.
Pathetic
