Taking Back Control - Why Britain needs a better approach to immigration

Other waves of migrants who did settle in the UK – such as the Huguenots, or the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who arrived around the turn of the 20th century – were small compared to the existing population.19 Net migration as a share of the UK population, 1857-2022 Sources: Bank of England (BoE), Office for National Statistics (ONS) 17 ONS, ‘Ethnic group, England and Wales: Census 2021’, C. [...] cps.org.uk 15 Taking Back Control Since the new immigration system came fully into effect, visas issued to migrants from the EU have made up just 4% of the total.28 In other words, both the overall numbers and composition of the current wave of immigration are very different from the 2000s and 2010s. [...] For example, we’ve taken the census data for each local authority district, and used it to construct an inverted variant of a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) – a measure of concentration (or in this case diversity) used in demography, biology, ecology, economics and sociology.57 In our index, the closer to 0 a value is, the more homogenous the population; the closer to 1, the more diverse. [...] It may not be a coincidence that the town of Boston was the most Eurosceptic in the country in 2016, with 75% of voters ticking the box to leave the EU. [...] So we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.’70 2015 Conservative manifesto: ‘We will keep our ambition of delivering annual net migration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.’71 ‘We have already capped the level of skilled economic migration from outside the EU.