UK Net Migration to Remain in Hundreds of Thousands Despite Tory Promises

Contrary to long-standing promises from Britain’s governing Conservative Party, net migration is expected to remain in the hundreds of thousands for the foreseeable future, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted this week.

In its list of Spring projections, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that net migration will remain at around 245,000 per year until at least the 2026/27 fiscal year, revising the estimate up by 40,000 more migrants compared to its previous release in November.

Alongside increases in refugee applications from Hong Kong and Ukraine, the statistician agency pointed to the post-Brexit points-based immigration system implemented by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a key factor in the continued high waves of migration, given that it failed to set a firm annual cap on migration.

However, in comments provided to Breitbart London, Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, suggested that annual arrivals over the coming years could actually be even higher: “The OBR’s assumption of net migration settling at 245,000 per annum has no basis. It was over half a million in the year to June 2022 and very likely to have been even higher for the whole of last year.”

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Despite many voters backing the Conservative Party in the 2019 election in the hopes of finally having a government free from European Union rules and able to actually reduce the number of migrants coming to the country, the opposite occurred, with a record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners and net migration hitting a record half a million last year — nearly doubling the peaks seen under the leftist Labour administration of Tony Blair.

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