Thursday’s migration figures are, in one sense, good news for the government. Net migration has fallen again, to less than 200,000 for the first time since the Covid period: an extraordinary reversal from the post-pandemic peak of nearly a million.
Yet few in government will be celebrating. In fact, net migration has been declining since the middle of 2023, but the politics of immigration has only become more poisonous. Labour has tightened legal migration and talked tougher on asylum while speeding up the processing of applicants, and accepted much of the premise of the right’s critique. But far from stopping Reform UK’s rise, this has created new problems for universities, social care, employers, migrants already in the United Kingdom and Labour’s own coalition.
This is the migration doom loop. The government responds to political pressure by promising to reduce numbers. The easiest reductions come from routes that are economically useful and administratively controllable: students, skilled workers, dependants, care workers. The fiscal and labour market costs then show up elsewhere, in weaker public services, lower tax revenues and more pressure on universities and care. Meanwhile, the political focus on immigration policy simply raises its salience. And in the UK’s current media climate, few believe that government policies actually achieve anything. Dissatisfaction rises, and the right says the problem is still immigration.
Today’s figures offer Labour a chance, perhaps its last, to break that loop. The question is whether the party will take it.
The government can reasonably claim that the post-Brexit immigration system has been brought under control. That does not mean migration is low by historic standards, nor that the system is working well across the board. But it does mean that the central political claim that ministers are powerless is false. Under the new system, the government can adjust salary thresholds, or change the list of jobs that qualify for work visas. Ministers can turn the dials, and that is exactly what they have done. The more serious question is whether they are turning them in a way that serves any coherent economic or political strategy.
So far, the answer is no. The government’s 2025 White Paper started from a sensible proposition: migration policy should be linked to skills, labour market policy and integration. But it too often collapsed into a numbers exercise, backed with rhetorical, evidence-free claims that recent migration had done “incalculable” damage. Its most contentious proposal—to make many migrants wait much longer for settlement—risks undermining exactly the integration the government says it wants to promote.
That should be the first place to reset. Labour should drop, or at least radically narrow, the proposal to extend the standard route to settlement from five to 10, 15 or even 20 years. A country that wants migrants to contribute should not keep them in prolonged insecurity. Settlement is one of the mechanisms—not the only one, but the most important one that is under direct state control—by which people put down roots, invest in their future, buy homes, change jobs, build families and become fully part of society. If the government wants contribution it should make contribution easier, not more conditional.
Second, Labour should stop pretending that social care can be fixed by immigration rules. Ending overseas recruitment of care workers without a funded workforce plan is cargo cult policymaking. If ministers want fewer care workers recruited abroad, they need to pay for higher wages, better conditions and a proper career structure. Otherwise, the result will be fewer migrants on paper and worse care in practice.
Third, the government needs a separate strategy for students. International students are a major export sector, a source of soft power and a key part of the finances of British higher education. There are legitimate questions to be asked about quality, compliance and the use of some courses primarily as a route into low-paid work. But the right response is regulation that addresses these specific issues, rather than indiscriminate deterrence. Cutting the graduate route further, or loading universities with punitive levies, would be a self-inflicted wound.
Fourth, asylum needs to be treated as an administrative and diplomatic problem, not a theatre for successive home secretaries to manifest their performative toughness. The priority should be faster and better decisions, more returns for those without legitimate claims, workable agreements with France and the European Union, and limited but real safe routes for those with family or other strong links to the UK. Offshore processing for rejected claimants may have political appeal, but it is unlikely to be a central solution. The lesson of the Rwanda scheme was not simply that it was immoral or expensive, although it was both; it was that symbolic deterrence tends to collapse on contact with law, logistics and reality.
The possible change in prime minister matters because immigration policy is now bound up with Labour’s wider identity crisis. Keir Starmer’s approach has been to concede much of the hard right’s framing, while insisting that Labour can administer immigration more competently. The result, predictably, has been derision and disbelief from xenophobes and their fellow travellers in politics and the media, and contempt and revulsion from migration liberals. A new leader, whether Andy Burnham or someone else, would have an opportunity to shift from defensive triangulation to a more durable argument: that control is necessary, but control is not the same as permanent restriction.
Such a reset would not mean a collapse into liberal complacency. Voters are entitled to expect the state to know who is coming into the country, on what terms, and with what consequences for housing, services and local labour markets. But they are also entitled to, and would benefit from, honesty. The UK is an ageing, service-based economy with chronic shortages, weak productivity growth, fragile universities and a care system close to breaking point. Pretending that substantially lower migration is cost-free is no more honest than pretending migration has no consequences.
Politically, this is not as naive as it sounds. Reform and the Conservative right will denounce any move away from maximal restriction as betrayal, but they will do that whatever Labour says. The question is whether the government can construct a position that sounds credible to voters who are worried about immigration but not obsessed by it, and who also care about living standards, the NHS, social care and economic competence. A strategy of managed openness allows Labour to say that the numbers have fallen, control has been restored and that the next task is to make the system work for the country. That is a better offer to the centre than simply chasing Reform down a road where Labour can never be the most convincing anti-immigration party.
It could also repair some of the damage on Labour’s left flank. Most of the voters Labour is losing to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents are not demanding open borders; they are reacting to rhetoric that sounds punitive, pessimistic and out of tune with modern Britain. A more confident line—firm on the exploitation and abuse by gangs, practical on asylum, but positive about migrants who work, study, pay taxes and settle here—would speak to graduates, younger voters, ethnic minority voters and urban liberals without frightening the centre.
Labour’s task is therefore to make the case for managed openness: migration at a lower and more stable level than the post-pandemic peak, but with routes that support growth, public services and integration. That means predictable rules, proper workforce planning, faster asylum processing, a realistic approach to students, and settlement policies that encourage belonging.
The fall in net migration gives Labour political space. A leadership change could give it rhetorical space. But neither will help unless the government uses this moment to say and demonstrate something different: that immigration is not a morality play, a numbers game or a proxy for national decline. It is a normal part of governing a modern economy. The government’s new approach should start there.
