Migration to the UK: Perception versus Reality

To the frustration of many, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has largely taken on its predecessor Tory government’s hard edged stance on migration, a stance shaped less by evidence than by the aggressive drumbeat of grievance politics on the far-right. Figures such as Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson present small-boat crossings, grooming scandals, and welfare myths as proof that Britain is losing control of its borders and, by extension, its identity. This article traces how those narratives took hold and sets their claims against the realities revealed by the data.

An Overview of Migration to the UK

Migration has long been a contentious issue in the UK. In the post-war decades the Windrush generation arrived from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth countries to help rebuild Britain’s workforce [4]. A few years later, Irish labour migration provoked xenophobic reactions; by the 1950s-60s lodging-house windows could still display the notorious sign “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” [5].

In the early 2000s migration from Eastern Europe increased as part of free movement within the EU. Nevertheless, non-EU immigration always played a dominant role. Thus when the UK left the EU, and despite Brexit’s promise to reduce arrivals, overall migration has risen sharply in recent years. EU inflows did fall after free movement ended, albeit modestly. Yet, most long-term migrants have always come from outside the bloc and the non-EU share now exceeds two-thirds [6].

Brexit also removed the UK from the Dublin III Regulation on 31 December 2020, ending the automatic return of asylum seekers to the first safe EU country they transited [7]. That legal gap has complicated co-operation with France and left the dangerous small-boat crossings of the Channel without the clearer resolution available before Brexit. In other words, Brexit has made migration harder to control, not easier.

The Mutation of the Far-right

Far-right narratives in post-war Britain have remained omnipresent and despite apparent demises they have simply re-emerged under new banners. After the overtly aggressive National Front collapsed electorally in the early 1980s, many activists drifted into the superficially more ‘acceptable’ British National Party (BNP), which itself peaked in 2009 before imploding a decade later. Hope not Hate’s State of Hate 2024 records how cadres displaced from the BNP and UKIP “continue to look for fresh vehicles on the populist right” [9].

Although UKIP and Nigel Farage’s successor outfit Reform UK formally bar former BNP members, press investigations have repeatedly uncovered ex-BNP and even ex-National Front organisers inside their local branches; Reform UK was still purging BNP-linked candidates as recently as 2024 [10][11].

At street level, the English Defence League, and later the personal brand of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (more commonly known as Tommy Robinson), has drawn heavily on football-hooligan and former National Front networks, providing a ready-made activist base [12].

This constant repackaging of extremist ideas has expanded the public Overton window on immigration and national identity. Experimental evidence shows that repeated media exposure to extreme-right frames nudges even moderate audiences towards tougher stances rather than provoking a backlash [13]. In short, the far-right have courted the public through repeat exposure and a continued focus on honing a respectable image.

The mainstreaming of far-right ideas today rests on meticulous optics and an aggressive social-media methodology. Groups such as the English Defence League and influencers like Tommy Robinson invest in well crafted TikTok and YouTube clips, turning street confrontations into slick highlight reels that reach millions [14]. Each clip is wrapped in a deliberate victimhood frame: whenever Robinson is arrested or de-platformed he recasts himself as a martyr for free speech, a narrative that research shows strengthens in-group loyalty and draws in new sympathisers who may not otherwise identify as extremist [15][16]. Hope not Hate’s State of Hate 2025 concludes that these tactics have “widened the pipeline between online grievance culture and electoral populism,” pushing once-fringe talking points into everyday political debate [17].

Far-right Grievances in 2025

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK keeps one theme on permanent loop: Britain is “under siege,” and the language of invasion. This narrative typifies the far-right in general. In July he blamed immigration for a “sharp rise in rapes” and demanded that any asylum-seeker arrested for sexual violence have their nationality publically disclosed [18]. A month later he unveiled a plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people who arrived by methods such as small-boat crossings, even if it meant “ripping up” human-rights law, before hurriedly rowing back when the backlash hit [19]. Small-boat crossings remain his talismanic grievance—proof, he insists, that the government has “lost control of our borders.”

Tommy Robinson amplifies the same anxieties through a more sinister conspiratorial lens. At September’s 110 000-strong Whitehall rally, Britain’s largest nationalist protest in decades, he cast migrants as a threat both to public safety and to “the people who built this nation,” invoking the far-right “great replacement” myth [20]. As a side note, he also claimed that three million were at the marches without any evidence, a position that went viral among right wing circles on social media.

Robinson’s signature issue is gang rapes. He claims that grooming networks of mainly Pakistani men are still being “covered up” by elites. The narrative resurfaced in early 2025 after a Reuters exposé and a Le Monde investigation spurred the government into announcing a national inquiry into historic grooming cases [21][22].

Outside the asylum-seeker residences themselves the temperature rose again in April, when hundreds of Union-Jack and St George’s-Cross flag-wavers descended on three former hotels in Knowsley, Loughborough and Crawley. Organised online by Britain First and boosted in real time by Tommy Robinson’s Telegram channel, the demonstrations turned confrontational. Police vans were pelted with bottles, a minibus was torched, and residents were moved for their own safety. Reform UK disavowed the violence but Farage described the scenes as “perfectly understandable public anger” at the government’s failure to “stop the boats” [23][24]. These are but a few examples of physical aggression towards asylum seekers and those that aid them.

Together, Farage and Robinson weave a story of moral panic., porous borders, predatory gangs, and a political class “too woke” to act. They pad the script with extra grievances—welfare abuse, cultural incompatibility, even complaints that migrants now have more rights in court than the British 'natives'. With the focus of the far-right claims focusing on asylum seekers the next sections itends to address some of these claims.

The Reality

As shown earlier, overall immigration has broken one record after another since 2021. Yet asylum routes remain a small fraction of the total. In 2023, approximately 7 % of the 1.22 million long-term arrivals were initially recorded as asylum seekers or refugees [25]. Even after the Ukrainian refugee schemes swelled humanitarian inflows, the Commons Library puts the share at about 13 % in 2024 [26]. By contrast, the now-iconic small-boat cohort was 29 437 people in 2023 (the annual peak to date), barely 2.4 % of all immigration that year [27]. The boats loom large in politics because they are visible and irregular, not because they dominate the numbers.

Critics often link those asylum arrivals to rising crime, but the official data do not bear that out. The Home Office and ONS both confirm they do not collect crime statistics by immigration status, and recent FOI replies say no breakdown exists for offences committed by asylum seekers [29]. What we can measure is the prison population: foreign nationals made up 12% of inmates in mid-2025 while accounting for ≈ 9 % of the resident population. On the surface a modest over-representation. Yet this is easily attributed to the young-male profile of recent migrants (70 % of irregular arrivals since 2018 are adult men) [30][28]. Adjusting for age and sex narrows the gap further, and large-scale studies find no systemic link between higher immigration and higher overall crime rates [31].

Sex-crime allegations feature heavily in far-right rhetoric, yet the evidence remains thin. Media-reported cases,such as the single Hyde Park rape by an Egyptian asylum seeker in 2024 [32], are horrific but anecdotal. When politicians claimed that foreign nationals account for 40 % of sexual crime, fact-checkers traced the figure to a misread FOI response that conflated “defendants proceeded against” with convictions and used out-of-date population denominators [31]. In short, isolated offences do not translate into epidemic levels, and official statisticians warn against drawing sweeping conclusions from sparse or incomparable data.

The numbers show that the migration system has been under pressure but not the crime wave portrayed by Farage or Robinson. Moreover, asylum routes form a slim slice of total inflows; most newcomers arrive to work or study, with those coming via small-boat crossings a sub-group of of this thin slice. Additionally, where migrants do appear in crime statistics, demographic factors explain much of the difference, contradicting the far-right’s main talking points.

This core aim of this article is to highlight the dishonesty of far-right rhetoric. With regards to economics they describe migrants as a drain on the economy, yet they remain silence on the economic benefits of immigration. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that those extra workers, most of them in their prime earning years, now account for the bulk of potential-output growth; a higher and younger labour force lifts GDP and eases the fiscal strain of an ageing population [33]. The Migration Advisory Committee reaches the same broad conclusion: an additional 200 000 net migrants a year raises overall GDP by 1½ per cent, with a negligible effect on output per head [34]. In short, migrants are, on balance, an economic asset, not a drag.

Then there is the cultural dividend, all too often ignored among the xenophobic noise. Britain’s creative industries, food scene and notable soft power are today inseparable from the talent and tastes of recent arrivals. Public opinion work by the charity British Future finds that shared creative projects, from community festivals to Eurovision watch-parties, build precisely the “bridging” social capital that defuses polarisation and makes diverse neighbourhoods feel like home [36]. The task, then, is to widen those everyday points of contact, not to retreat behind walls and ultimately promote segregation which far-right rhetoric tends to lead.

This is not to say integration doesn’t matter or still requires work. Dame Louise Casey’s widely acclaimed 2016 review warned that poorly managed settlement can harden “us-and-them” lines in deprived towns, especially when services are stretched [37]. Successive governments have talked integration but under-funded English-language classes, youth outreach and housing support, leaving some communities feeling overwhelmed. That perception of losing control, more than the headline numbers, is what fuels the electoral potency of Farage and Robinson.

So what would “control” actually look like?

• Expand safe, offshore application routes. The Refugee Council’s 2025 blueprint shows how humanitarian visas processed in partnership with European neighbours could drain demand for deadly Channel crossings while preserving the UK’s right to refuse frivolous claims [38]. This is a practical solution that would vastly improve optics.
• Fix the backlog and the optics. Faster, more credible decisions—and prompt removals where claims fail—are worth more politically than yet another arbitrary net-migration cap that cannot be met. Again, this improves optics whilst giving asylum seekers themselves greater clarity.
• Invest in integration. English classes, civic-orientation courses and community-led arts programmes cost a fraction of emergency hotel contracts and pay back in cohesion and confidence.
• Enforce a norms-based politics. Dehumanising language, “invasion,” “swarm,” “illegals,” must be called out across the spectrum; it poisons public debate and obscures policy trade-offs.

Migration will remain a fixture of modern Britain. The choice is between a politics of managed openness —transparent rules, decent safeguards, honest accounting of benefits and costs— or a politics of manufactured crisis, where ever-smaller problems are spun into existential threats. Starmer’s strongest ally is being seen as in control, this needn’t require a hardline on migration. Greater clarity is required from leading politicians that the far-right perception contradicts the reality. If this is not achieved, the far-right’s divisive perspective will divide Britain for a generation.

Bibliography
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[2] Office for National Statistics, Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2023 – Table 1 “Top 10 non-EU nationalities” and headline EU/British totals. Published 23 May 2024.

[3] (Used to plot percentage of small boat crossings) Home Office. Migrants detected crossing the English Channel in small boats – time series. OpenDocument spreadsheet SB_01 daily arrivals table, version updated 17 September 2025.

[4] Royal Museums Greenwich. The Story of the Windrush Generation.

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[14] Institute for Strategic Dialogue. HateScape: An In-Depth Analysis of Extremism and Hate Speech on TikTok. August 2021.

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[18] The Daily Telegraph, “Immigration to blame for rise in rapes, Farage claims,” 28 Jul 2025.
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[23] BBC News, “Far-right protesters clash with police outside Knowsley asylum hotel,” 12 Apr 2025.
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[33] Office for Budget Responsibility, Economic and fiscal outlook – March 2025, Chapter 2 (paras 2.19–2.21: labour-supply boost from higher net migration).

[34] Migration Advisory Committee, Report on Net Migration, 13 May 2025 (Scenario: +200 k net migration raises GDP by 1.5 %).
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