Immigration numbers and the media

 

According to YouGov, ‘Immigration and Asylum’ was the second most important issue facing the country in May, just behind the economy. According to IPSOS immigration/immigrants was the most important issue, rising well above the economy. Concern about immigration began rising at about the same time as net immigration into the UK started increasing dramatically, to nearly a million a year in 2023. Yet net immigration fell as rapidly as it rose, and at the end of 2025 was at levels typical of the period before the post-pandemic increase.

So why is public concern about immigration still so high? The straightforward reason is that most of the public don’t know that net immigration has fallen dramatically. According to recent polling conducted on behalf of British Future and the Policy Institute at Kings College London, only 16% of people think net immigration fell over the last year, while around half thought it had increased.

It shouldn’t be surprising that most people have little idea that net immigration has been falling rapidly over the last two years. Most people don’t follow data like this, and unlike issues like health or the cost of living they often don’t have their own or friends/relations experiences to fall back on. [1] When voters are asked about important local issues, immigration falls sharply down the list of issues that matter. They therefore rely to a much greater extent on what they pick up from traditional or social media.

Of course the nature of the concern that some people have about the issue is very real. It could be xenophobia, or just a dislike of change, or a perceived link to other issues like employment, wages, housing or access to public services. But whether immigration is intensifying those concerns does depend on the numbers involved, so it does matter that voters think immigration is increasing when in reality it is not.

What most voters do notice is what issues are talked about on regular news bulletins. If those news programmes involve politicians from Reform, then they will invariably talk about immigration or asylum because that is their issue. Because they want to sustain a concern about the issue, Reform politicians will not be telling the public that numbers have come right down. So voters imagine immigration numbers are still high and rising, because politicians are still talking as if they are.

We can blame government politicians for not emphasising the recent data enough (see below). But voter’s understanding of basic social or economic facts should not have to rely on the communication skills of politicians. It should be the media’s job to keep people informed. For the BBC, informing the public is part of their mission. In the case of immigration numbers it appears as if the media is failing to achieve this mission. As Chris Dillow reminds us, immigration numbers is not the only politically sensitive area where the public is seriously misinformed, and typically the misinformation favours the political right.

A major reason for this is that in some parts of the media, those parts where news is selected to become propaganda, this failure is entirely intentional. The right wing press, GB news and large parts of social media will describe high immigration numbers in terms of ‘floods’ and ‘invasions’, but will give far less publicity to falling immigration numbers. In this sense they act just like the right wing populist politicians they support.

However, for the broadcast media that likes to think of itself as impartial, this disconnect between reality and what voters perceive, for an issue which is politically crucial, should be keeping those who work in it awake at night. It doesn’t, of course. (If I’m wrong about this, let me know!) We often take it for granted that journalists should above all else want to get the facts across, particularly when those facts are not well understood or are simply not recognised, but increasingly In the UK, as in the US, there is little incentive for them to do so.

The obvious response from those in the media is that they do give immigration numbers publicity when this data comes out, and what else can they do? The answer is a lot. When journalists interact with politicians on a day to day basis, particularly those who benefit from popular misunderstandings, they can make a particular point of mentioning the data, like the latest immigration numbers. A regular question for right wing populist politicians is why they are not welcoming the fact that immigration numbers have come right down. The same can be done in the commentary that senior political journalists in the broadcast media regularly give in interpreting political news.

As I suggested earlier, the media doesn’t do this because they don’t have sufficient incentives to do so. The media worries about what politicians think, and as a result is obsessed by balance, but most politicians are more interested in favourable coverage than the facts. In the UK the propaganda news media has an outsize influence on the broadcast media. Finally the UK regulator, Ofcom, is hopeless.

Public misunderstanding of facts in highly sensitive political areas will only be corrected when the media has an incentive to do what it can to correct them. That incentive has to come from politicians and the media regulator, because it is not going to come from anywhere else. In assessing the health of a country’s collective media, the extent of public misunderstanding on key issues should be a critical piece of evidence. Media bosses should be held to account for this, and asked constantly what they are doing to correct it.

Because these public misunderstandings typically favour the political right, and often come from the section of the media that supports the political right, then we cannot expect right wing politicians to apply this kind of pressure. Indeed the political right would be happy to see little or no media regulation. Pressure of the kind I am suggesting has to come from the political centre and left.

Our current Labour government has failed dismally here for many reasons. First, as I noted some time ago, it seems to have little interest in improving media regulation, and has left those imparting a right wing bias to the BBC and media regulation in place. Second, it has enacted some policies designed to reduce immigration numbers that will cause serious economic damage, like helping to cripple one of the UK’s most successful export industries. Third, and most alarmingly, it sometimes adds to public misunderstanding by repeating false narratives like immigration is adding to pressure on public services. In this respect, a government that has seen immigration fall drastically and yet is getting no credit for doing so has only themselves to blame.

[1] I would argue that the term ‘the economy’ can have a similar quality to it.