Number crunch: why Britons ignore immigrant drop

单集文稿 ...

• 00:03

  The Economist.

• 00:10

  And welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

• 00:13

  I'm Rosie Blau.

• 00:14

  And I'm Jason Palmer.

• 00:19

  Today on the show, aboard a US nuclear submarine, and which products actually fight wrinkles.

• 00:33

  First up though, immigration to Britain has gone through the most extraordinary boom and bust cycle.

• 00:47

  Joel Budd is our social affairs editor.

• 00:50

  After the COVID pandemic, when Britain started to allow people to move freely into the country,

• 00:56

  the number of immigrants rose very, very dramatically to the sort of levels that Britain has never seen.

• 01:03

  In the year to March 2023, more than one and a half million immigrants arrived in the country,

• 01:10

  intending to stay for more than a year or so at least.

• 01:14

  And many, many fewer left.

• 01:16

  So net migration, which is what Britain tends to obsess over, went above 900,000 per year.

• 01:22

  So it was as though a city the size of Birmingham had suddenly materialized in the country.

• 01:30

  Were they?

• 01:32

  They were a mixture.

• 01:33

  Some were Hong Kongers and Ukrainians because the British government had favoured people from those countries,

• 01:39

  recognising that Hong Kongers were facing oppression and Ukrainians, of course, invasion.

• 01:43

  Some were students who were taking advantage of much more liberal rules about working after graduation.

• 01:49

  But quite a few of them were simply workers.

• 全部文稿