After Shock Migration Figures, Over Half of Britons Support Five Year Pause on All New Arrivals

The British public are considerably more conservative than the ruling Conservative party on the question of migration, polling taken in the wake of this week’s shock migration figures shows.

A majority of Britons are concerned the nation’s population is soaring because of mass migration and, astonishingly, a majority even support a “five-year halt on all further immigration into the UK”. Reducing migration to zero, never mind for five whole years, is a position on border control so strident there is no political party in Britain that voters could even support to deliver such a policy.

The figures, which come from research by British Polling Council member People Polling in response to this week’s record net migration figures, shows a strong majoirty are concerned about migration having an impact on the population of the United Kingdom. Per a statement by Migration Watch, who commissioned the polling seen by Breitbart London 66 per cent of Britons said they are concerned about projections based on the present rate of migrant arrivals which suggest the UK population would reach 85 million by 2046 if nothing changes.

43 per cent of those polled said they were “very concerned” about migration-driven population growth and just four per cent said that didn’t concern them at all. To the Britons polled, this is not merely a hypothetical question either, with a strong plurality believing mass migration is having real-world impacts on the nation. Per the research, the largest group of respondents at 42 per cent said they agreed that “immigration is detrimentally affecting the quality of life in Britain”, while just ten per cent think migration is having an overall positive impact.

While the British government has promised to reduce overall migration to the United Kingdom for decades, despite enjoying 13 years of power and most recently nearly five years with an overwhelmingly powerful Parliamentary majority it has totally failed to do so. In fact migration is now at record levels and even basic issues like tackling illegal migration remain unaddressed.

That is not to say options to control levels of migrant arrivals don’t exist, however, and even trenchant approaches that would be derided as totally unacceptable among the Westminster elite are polled as being acceptable to the voting public itself. The People Polling figures claim their research shows an outright majority of 53 per cent support “temporary five-year pause on all further immigration into the UK so that the UK can better absorb the immigration of the last few decades”.

The split is not especially close, either, given just 22 per cent said they are opposed to the measure, with 25 per cent saying they did not know how they feel about the policy. The idea of giving the nation a short break to recover from the recent record levels of migration could be seen as the polar opposite of migration policy as actually delivered in practice by the governing Conservative Party, which has gone from promising to get net migration down “to the tens of thousands” a year a decade ago, to over a million arrivals net in less than two years now.

Migration Watch itself warned the government that their failures on migration were likely to impact them when an election comes. Chairman Alp Mehmet said in a statement: “The continuing, astonishing migration levels we learned about this week and what It means for future population growth has spooked us all. Is it any wonder that people are now beginning to see a pause to all Immigration as part
of a solution? Mr Sunak should take heed. The public can only be ignored for so long before they make their feelings known.”

The striking polling results come in the wake of figures from the UK government’s statistical agency this week which revealed net migration — fresh arrivals minus the number of people leaving the country — had climbed by tens of thousands more over the same period the year before, hitting 672,000. The office said of how this was impacting the country: “the population of England and Wales has grown at the fastest rate seen since 1962.

“However, unlike the baby boom driving population growth in the 1960s, the increases seen today are predominantly being driven by international migration.”

While the figures should be deeply embarrassing for the Conservatives, they appear to have reacted to them with little concern. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was asked on Friday whether he had any new plans to bring down overall migration levels and revealed he had no intention of reducing legal routes for entry, and could only cite one months-old plan to tackle visa “abuse”.