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.
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’m sending you back to the I.R.C! 🤓
As long as it’s not Kekistan.