The Truth About Migration and Asylum in the UK |

The only sensible place to start with this subject is to outline the actual problems that we face with migration.

There is, of course, a problem with people crossing the channel in small boats, there is a problem with asylum seekers being housed in hotels and there is a problem with undocumented migrants in wider society. There are also perceived problems around migrants committing crime, depleting the already stretched welfare state and not integrating in or contributing to society.

In 2025, there were roughly 41,000 people who arrived in the UK by small boats and, since 2018, there have been a total of 194,000 people. The number of people crossing the channel in small boats for the year ending the day before we left the EU was 1843 people. The following year, 2020, this figure quadrupled to 8462. This almost quadrupled again in 2021 to more than 28500 people and has risen almost every year since then.

Why? Why has this risen so quickly from a very obvious starting point?

The answer is not that difficult to get to the bottom of: According to the government’s own statistics on asylum, in 2019, there were 35,737 main applicants for asylum to the UK which is actually more than the total number of asylum claimants in 2020, though it subsequently increased massively. In January of 2020, we officially left the European Union and as such, withdrew from the Dublin protocols. As I’ve said in previous videos, if an asylum claim is rejected in any EU country, then under these protocols, they are forbidden from claiming asylum in any other EU country and can be returned to the first country in which they tried to claim asylum, and from there can be returned to their country of origin. This gives asylum seekers very limited options; return to their country of origin where they were being persecuted (assuming that their claim is genuine), or find a none member state to travel to; namely, the UK. This meant that there were far fewer safe and legal routes to come to the UK to claim asylum. In addition to this, the Conservative government at the time started to massively slow down the asylum process and further close safe and legal routes, meaning that more and more people were forced to use illegal methods of arrival to claim asylum; small boats. Currently around half of all asylum claimants arrive in the UK by small boats. Initially, the numbers didn’t change, the law did.

As for the subsequent rise, just look at what has happened around the world since Brexit; a global pandemic, war between Russia and Ukraine, human rights abuses all over the Middle East after the unilateral withdrawal of all Western Forces from the region, the significant lack of political freedom, forced indefinite conscription and human rights abuses in in Eritrea and ongoing civil wars in Sudan. The world has become a significantly more dangerous place for a lot of people and this drives both migration and asylum and given that large swathes of the pant have English as a second language due to our very problematic and oppressive colonial past, it is understandable that lots of these people choose to come to the UK if they can’t claim asylum elsewhere.

These massive numbers of asylum claimants are obviously a new phenomenon though, aren’t they? Well, no they are not. These are the same numbers that we had in the mid 1990s up to 2003, and nobody was saying we were being invaded then!

Both asylum and migration ebb and flow over time in line with global politics and conflict. In 2003, migration fell sharply due to the war on terror and it stayed relatively low, roughly 2019 levels or below, until Brexit. So, if we have had this level of asylum claimants before, why are we now wearing flags, painting roundabouts and shouting at hotels?

Well, we have had successive Prime Ministers under the conservative government that have tried to run the country as a business rather than a country; they have continuously sold off public assets for personal profit, cut public services for efficiency and savings and increased the tax take from ordinary people through stealth taxes like freezing tax thresholds. The current Labour government are doing more of the same because they are part of the Neo-liberal uni-party. This has led to people being significantly poorer and angrier.

Next, those same governments have continuously cut the Arts and Humanities from school curriculums in favour of focussing on STEM subjects (yes those subjects still exist in some schools but not all subjects exist in all schools). I’m all in favour of STEM; my degree is in Engineering and I work as a professional engineer, but as is shown in the American education system, teaching a subject like engineering without also teaching the arts and humanities leads to engineers who do not understand people, human needs or even basic humanity and many of these engineers end up designing against the end users rather than for them, which frequently increases inequalities and fail to address societal issues. In the case of the UK’s education policy, this has resulted in two outcomes; people who did well at school have that have effectively been trained as technical bureaucrats with little to no training and understanding of the human condition and people who did not do well at school; these people not only failed to achieve in the STEM subjects but were also possibly denied the chance to study other subjects in any detail. We have a very polarised, two tier education system; the uneducated and the technical bureaucrats. Obviously this does not apply to everyone, not even close, but there has been a sharp decrease in educational standards over the last two decades.

Finally, two more things happened; the far right rose in America and the right gained ground here, so we had poorer angrier people with lower standards of education being influenced by rage politics imported from America whilst Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Kier Starmer and Shabana Mahmood weaponised asylum claimants by making their passage to the UK illegal, then housing them in shitty hotels so they can point at them and say ‘Look at them… staying in hotels… they are the problem’ whilst ignoring the fact that they themselves had ruined the country.

As a nation, we are stupider, poorer and angrier than we used to be and the political elite have provided an extremely convenient scapegoat to point the finger at as a distraction from their ineptitude.

If we set aside the rhetoric and rage for a moment, what is the truth of those coming here to claim asylum? 75% of claimants are men. This is because the journey from their country of origin is often highly dangerous so the men often come alone, claim asylum and then attempt to get a family reunion visa afterwards. According to the Refugee council, in 2024, 43% of asylum claims were successful on application. In 2025, it was around 50%. Most of the failed claims however, were overturned on appeal. This significantly draws out the asylum process and in many instances, the process can take years. Whilst awaiting a claim result, asylum seekers are housed in either detention facilities or in low quality hotels and they are not allowed to work. For income, the government gives them £7 per day. When was the last time you survived on £7 a day for an extended period of time? In 2024, 4% of asylum claimants were unaccompanied children and, when a claim is finally successful, the claimant is given 28 days to vacate the hotel or detention facility, meaning they have 28 days to find a job, try to find a home, try to find the deposit for that home, try to open a bank account and try to set up the rest of their new life. Obviously, this is ridiculous and many end up homeless as a result.

So, a person who is being persecuted, abused or is in mortal danger flees their country, often with nothing but what they can carry. They then spend months travelling, with no money or safety to get to a European country where they try to claim asylum and are refused. They make their way to France, to the beaches where they try to obtain passage from criminal gangs but whilst there, are routinely beaten, tortured and abused by French police who are paid to do this by the British government. They finally get on a small boat, risking their life crossing the channel. They arrive in Britain and are immediately detained and sent to either a detention facility or a crappy hotel and given £7 a day to try to survive on whilst being barred from working and ostracised by local communities, only to then have to face hotel shouters who are being radicalised and incited to burn them alive. If they are lucky enough to have their claim approved after potentially living like this for years, they then face the very real risk of becoming homeless yet again. If by some miracle, they manage to find work and somewhere to live, they then try to apply for a family reunion visa only to learn that since September 2025, the government had frozen this program; no new applications have been allowed to be made since. 30,000 people are currently living like this in the UK. Whilst that number would only fill on third of Wembley Stadium and is not a large number on a national scale, on a human scale, it is an awful lot of people. Meanwhile, the hotel owners have taken £5.4 billion of taxpayers money… and you are angry at the asylum seekers.

With specific respect to Asylum, the policy offered by Reform simply will not work. Their policy, and I am paraphrasing and abridging here to make the point, is to reject claims of asylum and to try and dissuade crossing in small boats by using the Royal Navy as a bulwark. First of all, the asylum seekers are already risking their lives on the crossing, so having the Royal Navy there will only encourage them as it increases their safety. The Navy can not open fire on them so would have to pick them up. They can not take them back to France, so they would have to put them ashore in the UK. Once ashore, they would still be able to make an asylum claim that could be appealed if refused and, even if they were prevented from claiming in the first place, they wouldn’t be able to be removed from the country as no other country wanted them in the first place and now they would be taking them back without any due process? It is all smoke and mirrors from Reform.

The Green Party on the other hand, would make all routes to the country legal. This would almost eradicate the small boat crossing over night. Next, asylum claimants would be treat fairly and would be given temporary accommodation whilst their claim was assessed along with access to the NHS. Claims would be assessed within 3 months. If successful, the claimant would be granted indefinite leave to remain and if the claim failed, they would be free to go to another country, but if they had not left the country within a 6 month grace period, they would then be classed as a normal migrant with no need for protection. Whilst there is much more in the policy, this is the important part of it. Make all routes legal to stop the small boats, treat all applicants as people and if it turns out that their claim is genuine, provide protection for as long as they desire it and if their claim is not valid, treat them as a migrant. I honestly can not see anything controversial in that. Certainly not when compared to the barbarism of the current system.

Moving on to normal migration, there are a few arguments against migration that I hear regularly. These are to get rid of all illegal migrants, that migrants do not contribute to society, that they come here as health tourists to take advantage of the NHS, that they don’t integrate, that they are all criminals and that we are being invaded by millions of migrants. I’ll tackle each of these points individually.

Starting with the concept that they don’t contribute to society, when we look at all migrants who have been here for 10 or more years, so this is people who have had their migration status settled, have moved in to and settled in communities and have had a chance to set up their new lives in the UK, as a percentage of their demographic, people who came here to seek asylum are almost as likely to be in employment as UK born people, only a few percent more likely be economically inactive or unemployed and much of this can be explained by the specific challenges faced by asylum seekers that I have already outlined, but when we look at regular migrants, they are MORE likely to be employed and less likely to be economically inactive than UK born people. Next, when we look at earnings, in every salary band up to the 75^th percentile, so those earning more than 75% of the population, those who have claimed asylum earn significantly less than than UK born people but regular migrants earn more than UK born people on average. This means that those who have claimed asylum tend to be heavily discriminated against but regular migrants pay more in tax than UK born people, so the argument that they don’t contribute is nonsense; one group of people are often prevented from contributing as much whilst another group contribute more. This argument then is not a valid argument against migration.

Next, they come to use the NHS as health tourists; asylum claimants can utilise the NHS for free until their asylum status is either settled or refused, at which point, they either obtain indefinite leave to remain and can continue using the NHS for free, or for a rejected claim from a non EEA resident, they can not access secondary NHS care for free and are charged for that treatment. Regular migrants have to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge as part of their Visa application and this is currently £1035 per year, every year. This is a specific fee to use the NHS. Do you know who does not pay a specific fee to use the NHS? UK born people. Yes, we pay taxes, but there is no specific fee for the NHS. Given this, the health tourism argument against migration is not a valid argument.

The integration argument is more complex; if you look at large cities like London, Manchester or Leeds, many migrants integrate perfectly well. In those cities and elsewhere in the country though, they may live in more isolated pockets, remaining in communities with others of their own nationality and not integrating as well. In these cases, we need to ask why. There are lots of reasons for this but most of the reasons essentially boil down to the fact that they are not made to feel welcome by white British people. There is a lot of racism and bigotry within our society including institutional racism form employers, the police, the government, all of our media…this would understandably make migrants feel uncomfortable or potentially threatened, so they turn to their own communities for help, support, friendship or anything else they need. Over time, this becomes the community norm and we end up with isolated communities that reinforce this behaviour on both sides of the equation. The integration argument has some validity, but the reasons for this are of our own making as a society and to try and deny this or shift the blame for this is disingenuous and continues the harm done by this.

Next, the idea that all migrants are criminals; this is by no means a simple problem to tackle as the police and government do not record the migration status of people committing crimes. In fact, the statistics only capture arrests and convictions, not offending, and it takes no account of the length of time someone has been resident in the country or a million other important details, so migrant populations could be either under or over represented in the data. This means that the only way to make any assertions about this subject is to look at the data we do actually have and this shows that non-UK nationals make up 12.4% of the prison population. Meanwhile, non-UK nationals make up around 14% of the general population; 16% of the population are born outside of the UK but some of those will be UK nationals. If we were to take this data at face value, it suggests that migrants are less likely to commit serious crime than UK nationals. The truth of the matter is that there is not enough data either way to make any realistic claims, but there is in general, no reason to suspect that migrants commit more crime than UK born people and as such, this is not a valid argument.

Next, the legal status of migrants; estimates for the numbers of migrants in the UK illegally are difficult to estimate due to the illegal status of those people and not wanting to be found, but most come in at an average of about 800,000 people. This statistic however, includes those applying for asylum and those who had visas but have overstayed. This is a lot of people to be here illegally, but what is the actual problem with their illegality? I would suggest that it is because they can not legally work and therefore can not pay taxes, that because they are here illegally, they are harder to track for all sorts of purposes including potential criminal activity, health status , education status or whatever else might be important. This is a legitimate concern. The current government, along with Reform and the conservatives believe that we should be hunting these people down and deporting them. Think about the costs involved in that process; they would be huge. Then think about the benefits of it if it were successful; not much as they are already not able to access the benefits system and are already not paying tax. The Green Party have a better solution to this; undocumented migrants will be given free advice and support to help them to regularise their status without penalty for being undocumented and if they have been here for more than 5 years, they will be invited to apply for settled status providing they do not meet any of the exclusions. This would instantly allow them to work and pay tax and means that the police and judiciary would not be held up with countless cases of undocumented migration, meaning they would be free to pursue the types of crime that we all actually worry about. This means that the illegal status of migrants is a valid concern and under current rules is a real problem, the Green Party have a real solution to it.

Finally, the idea that we are being invaded by millions of migrants, there are two answers to this; if you are making an argument about this because you think white British people are under attack or that we are being replaced by migrants or you think that whiter people will end up as a minority, all of these ideas are based on the great replacement theory which is an aggressive ethno-nationalistic idea with no basis in reality. It is highly racist and bigoted and is used by fascists to facilitate abuse of people who are not white and in many cases, who are not white Christians. If you fall in to this category, we have nothing to talk about as you will likely not listen to reason and even if you did, you probably don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the arguments. If on the other hand your argument is centred around population growth and its economic effects, then yes, we can talk.

Net migration ebbs and flows with all sorts of political, societal and global issues. In 2025 for example, net migration was around 204,000 people which is much lower than previous years. Given the already discussed aspects of migration, it is more useful for the rest of this section to talk about population growth as this encompasses regular migration, asylum births and deaths and is therefore a more holistic way to look at the problem. There is no denying the fact that the population of the UK is growing. Over the last 26 years, the population has grown by about 10 million people. This is a problem for a few reasons; the UK already relies on imports of food to feed the population. Using current methods of farming and food production, we will never be able to meet these demands on a national level, so the more people we have, the more we have to rely on imports which significantly reduces our sovereignty and increases the risks from global instability. Next, public services have been cut year on year for the past 47 years so now there are significantly fewer, lower quality public services being stretched across more and more people as the population grows. There is a housing crisis in this country with something like 700,000 houses sat empty as landlords use them as land banks, there are too few new houses being built and the vast majority of those are entirely unaffordable, meaning that supply and demand are becoming ever more separated as the population grows. As more and more people are choosing to live in large towns and cities, these spaces are becoming more and more cramped and expensive. The current government, along with Reform and the conservatives have no real plans to tackle this. The Green Party’s migration policy is often lambasted for being too generous. Objections about open borders are invalid and just show that people haven’t actually read the policy. The policy does however, potentially allow for significantly more migration as it aims to have a fair migration policy that treats migrants as human beings rather than as objects of scorn. The problem of criticising this policy on the grounds of increasing population size however, is that it ignores three very important things; Since the year 2000, the global population has risen by 2 billion people and this is set to continue past 2050. Given the increasing affects of climate change, war and political instability, migration is set to increase year on year to all countries in the global north, which can be read as Western nations. As this happens, all of these countries will be left with a stark choice; allow migration and asylum or allow those people to die. And before anyone jumps to the ‘let them die’ conclusion, remember that these are people. People with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, joys and loves, parents, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters just like us and just like us, they have the same right to live and to live without prejudice. They are human and are covered by the same human rights that we are and their human rights are just as important as ours. Ignoring this fact is sociopathic.

Next, the criticism assumes that all of these people want to come to the UK. This is blatantly ridiculous; look at the numbers of migrants going to other European countries. Looking at total migration numbers, in 2023 the UK had a total migration of 897,000 which was the highest of any individual country in Europe. Remember, this is total migration though, not net migration. The next highest number was for Germany at 793,000. In 2024 by comparison, Germany took more migrants than the UK. On the face of it, this seems to show that migrants are more likely to come here than anywhere else. But what happens when we look at say the next four most popular countries combined, Germany, Spain, France and Italy; just these four countries alone took almost 2 million migrants in 2023, with all other European countries taking migrants as well. What this actually shows is that migrants are significantly more likely to migrate to the European mainland than they are to migrate here.

The final thing that the critique misses, is that the Green Party has a full suite of developed policies, including one on population size. This policy looks at managing population size holistically and based upon consumption and sustainability, but importantly, a part of this policy is to open the subject up to democratic debate so that fair and realistic limits as well as methods of limitation of population size can be discussed.

Given this, the argument against migration based on population size and population growth is valid, but the only party proposing anything realistic surrounding the subject is the Green Party, and their approach is based in fairness and democratic decision making.

In summary, both asylum and migration do pose challenges to the UK, but I hope that throughout this, I have managed cut through the propaganda and to highlight the truth of the matter. Remember, that all of the sources of information I have used here can be found in the description below. Whilst there are challenges, there is one party that has realistic proposals to tackle those challenges in a fair and humane way and, when their policies are read holistically rather than in isolation, the feasibility of their plans only increases. None of the other parties even come close to this. It is also worth mentioning, that if you agree with some parts of the policies but disagree with other parts, you can change those policies by joining the Green Party and campaigning for change. All policies in the Green Party are developed and selected democratically. One final thing to say about this is, whilst migration and asylum are an issue for the UK, do not believe the propaganda being pushed on us from all sides that this is what you should be most concerned about or that migrants are responsible for the state of the country. What you should be most concerned about is that for decades, the Neo-liberal uni-party has consistently cut public services and has consistently voted to make you poorer and remove power from you whilst simultaneously voting to give your hard earned money and power to the ultra-wealthy. The government and the ultra-wealthy are why the country is broken and why your life is worse than it used to be. The government and the ultra-wealthy are the ones that have been consistently acting against your interests. The government and the ultra-wealthy are the ones that have been doing politics against you. Fuck them. Vote Green and vote for a politics that is of, for and by the people.

References.

The Migration Observatory, number of small boat crossings: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/people-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/

Employment status of asylum claimants, migrants and UK born populace: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/migobs/viz/AsylumYEDec2024/Fig15

Earnings: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/migobs/viz/AsylumYEDec2024/Fig16

Number of asylum seekers pre-Brexit: https://www-media.refugeecouncil.org.uk/media/documents/Asylum-Statistics-Aug-2020.pdf

Main applicant asylum applications: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN01403/SN01403.pdf

Refugee council information for 2025: https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/stay-informed/explainers/top-facts-from-the-latest-statistics-on-refugees-and-people-seeking-asylum/

Racism in Engineering: https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/racism-in-america-manifested-in-engineering-design-a-pledge-to-take-responsibility-and-action

Engineering against people: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-culture-of-engineering-overlooks-the-people-its-supposed-to-serve/

Migration statistics: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06077/SN06077.pdf

Illegal migrants: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/unauthorised-migration-in-the-uk/

Immigration Health Surcharge: https://www.davidsonmorris.com/ihs-fee-uk/