The TRUTH they're not telling you about the new migration figures in the UK
Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to 94,000 subscribers. Inner Circle and Paid subscribers access every post, the full archive, the comments, join Matt live every Friday, and know they’re supporting an independent writer speaking up for the silent majority. Join us on YouTube, Instagram, X and Facebook. We will always tell you truth. Support us by upgrading or donating.
The political class in the UK wants you to breathe a sigh of relief. The new migration figures have just been released. They show net migration added ‘only’ 171,000 people to the country last year, nearly half the number in 2024.
Keir Starmer is smiling, telling the country his Labour government is ‘delivering’. Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is boasting that Labour is ‘restoring order and control’ to our borders’. And the liberal legacy media is telling you the country has finally ‘turned a corner’. Relax, everybody, everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
But here’s what they’re not telling you.
Here’s what they don’t want you to know. And here’s the detail that’s hidden away, behind the headline numbers, which tells you what is really happening to our country, our culture, and our population.
The British people are being subjected to one of the fastest and most dramatic population explosions anywhere in the Western world. And millions of ordinary people out there can already feel it, even if Westminster is playing it down.
Keir Starmer, the Labour Party, the BBC, and the pro-immigration expert class all want you to focus on the headline ‘net migration’ figure of 171,000, meaning 171,000 more people settled in Britain last year than left the country.
But what really matters - beyond the fact the political class has no problem adding a town the size of Reading to the population in just one year - is not the headline net migration figure but the ‘churn’ that’s happening beneath the surface.
This is what Westminster doesn’t want you to dwell on.
Look at the latest figures.
Last year, some 813,000 immigrants arrived in Britain, of which 627,000 came from outside Europe - from countries with radically different cultures, economies, traditions, and ways of life, including India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and China.
At the same time as hundreds of thousands of migrants from culturally distant parts of the world settled in Britain, some 642,000 people left Britain — including a quarter of a million British people and more than 100,000 Europeans.
And before anybody says it: no, the people who are leaving Britain are not British pensioners retiring to the Costa Del Sol. Roughly half of the British people who left Britain last year are aged between 16 and 34-years-old, in the prime of their lives.
What our political class is doing, in other words, is replacing Britain’s young people - including our best and brightest who share our culture, language, and identity - with low-income, low-skill, and poorly educated migrants who are a net fiscal cost to our economy and come from radically different cultures outside Europe.
Close to 80 per cent of all immigration into Britain today is coming from outside European civilisation and is the exact kind of immigration that’s consistently been shown - in studies from Denmark to Finland - to be the most economically costly and the most likely to drive crime and social disorder.
It was the same story before the latest figures, by the way.
In 2024, 948,000 immigrants arrived in Britain of which 766,000 came from outside Europe while more than a quarter of a million British people left.
And in 2023, 1.3 million immigrants arrived, 1.1 million of whom came from outside Europe while more than a quarter of a million British people left.
What we are witnessing, in short, what nobody in Westminster will ever tell you but which I explain in detail in my book, is the ongoing ‘demographic replacement’ of the British people. There is simply no other way to describe what is happening.
What other terms can you use when, last year, nearly 400,000 British and European people left Britain while nearly 630,000 migrants from outside Europe arrived?
Just look at the sheer speed and scale of this change.
Between 2021 and 2025, some 5.6 million people migrated into Britain, with net migration of non-British people adding 3.2 million people, net, to the population. This is equivalent to adding nearly three Birmingham’s in just four years.
As I point out in my book, there’s been more immigration into Britain in every single year since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 than there was during the combined 1,500 years between the Anglo-Saxons and the end of the Second World War.
Combined, net migration into Britain added less than 70,000 people to the country in the 25 years before Blair came to power but has added close to 6 million people to the country in the 25 years since then.
As the brilliant researcher Karl Williams points out, in the last few years the British people have been subjected to the fastest rate of population growth since the year 1828 - with mass immigration, not natural growth among the British people, responsible for 99 per cent of this population increase.
Today, one in every five people in Britain were not born in Britain. And roughly one in every 20 people in Britain today arrived in the last five years alone.
At the same time, nearly 1 million British people left the country between 2021 and 2024, an average of 679 British people leaving every single day.
None of this is normal. None of this is the kind of stable, manageable change that makes the long-term survival of a nation possible. On the contrary, it is extreme.
It is an extreme demographic project that’s being imposed on the British people from above with no democratic consent whatsoever.
This is why the political class will only ever talk to you about the headline ‘net migration’ figure, and why one liberal columnist after another will now line up to try and convince you that everything is fine - there is nothing to see here.
Because focusing only on the headline number allows them to distract you from the sheer speed and scale of population churn that’s now fundamentally transforming the underlying fabric and character of our national identity, culture, and way of life, and which is also undermining our national democracy given nobody voted for it.
What the political and media class in Westminster does not seem to understand is that a nation is not a hotel. It is not a place where you do not know who is living next door, what language they speak, what culture they cling to, what traditions and behaviours they practice.
A nation is home, defined by a shared culture, a shared identity, a shared sense of collective memory and history, and a shared way of life.
Yet, increasingly, from one year to the next, it feels as though the people who have been entrusted to preserve and protect our home are instead destroying it.
Many ordinary people have noticed this, which is why they just told pollsters Ipsos-MORI that immigration, not the economy, is the most important issue facing Britain.
They are talking about the visible transformation of their communities. They are talking about about towns, cities, and increasingly villages changing beyond all recognition. They are talking about hospitals, schools, and GP surgeries being completely overwhelmed, and wages being suppressed.
And they are talking about young British people, and British workers too, being undercut and smashed apart by an economy and political class that now relies on importing cheap labour instead of investing in its own people.
Nations only work when their people are joined together by a shared identity, history, values, and culture. Remove that and people’s trust in the system will collapse, the social fabric or glue that once held a nation together will give way, and people will withdraw and hunker down in what feels like a cheap one-star hotel - not home.
The blunt reality is that even if net migration fell to zero tomorrow, the demographic transformation that I’m pointing to is already underway and, unless we urgently change course, will only accelerate in the years ahead.
This is also why any call for ‘net zero migration’ makes little sense. We need to stop obsessing about the headline number and start thinking far more seriously about what kind of country we are creating and becoming.
Because right now, the country that is rapidly emerging around us might call itself Britain, it might call itself England it might call itself the United Kingdom.
But soon, unless we change direction by changing the political class that has been overseeing these extreme experiment, it will not look like a Britain, an England, or a United Kingdom that ourselves and our ancestors would ever recognise.
I look forward to joining our paid subscribers for a live discussion about these issues and more on the Substack App every Friday at 2pm UK time. We cannot make these arguments and share them with millions of people each month without your support. Upgrade to support.
The political classes have been telling us for decades that greater immigration is an unm itigated success and good for the rest of us. That being so (and it is) they ought to now be hanging their heads in shame.
Why are they not delivering the huge advantages they promised us?
The public, of course, know the truth of it. Except for a relatively few of them, immigration has been damaging to the bulk of Brits especially this century.
I am extremely pleased to read this piece.
I have made comments here and elsewhere that the gross migration figures, both inwards and outwards, are what matters most but not for maybe 2 years because nobody seemed to care and the impending doom became too depressing.
Nation state, especially those founded upon classically liberal principles, are the only chance for democracy and individual liberty, globalism the opposite. Most of the world has never known either so the idea that the United Nations is the route to global liberal, democratic bliss is an absurd fantasy as is the notion that what is happening to us can spell anything short of a recipe for the genocide of the English speaking world.
Please, Matt, find a way to get your message from this piece on the awful BBC for it is the only source of ‘news’ for far too many!