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Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

Brexit has caused immigration from non-EU countries to increase.

According to the government's own statistics we've seen massive increases from countries like India despite the anti-immigration rhetoric displayed by the Tories.

We've also got a partnership with India that helps fill in the gaps. Not to mention the record study visa's issued to India.

"India first again. I’m delighted that Indian nationals were issued the largest number of UK study, work and visitor visas in the year ending June 2022. More strength to the unique living bridge that connects our people." Alex Ellis, British High Commissioner to India [2]

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/india-receives-largest-sh...

https://fullfact.org/immigration/eu-migration-and-uk/

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Increase in total numbers or in proportion?

Edit: the link above shows that in raw numbers, non-EU migration increased while EU decreased. Appears to not be a complete 1:1 replacement, though. I asked because if you only give the proportion, it can still increase if just the EU migration numbers go down.

Also relevant to reading the graph, the campaign/referendum on brexit started in 2015.

Increasing immigration from India was an explicit Leave campaign promise, obviously only made to the Indian community in the UK, targeted advertising is great.

Yeah I wonder how the anti-immigration-reason leave-voters feel about that.

Ok, but net migration is still way down:

>An estimated 202,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK in the year to September 2018, and about 145,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 57,000—roughly the lowest level recorded since 2009.

>In the year before the referendum, net EU migration was estimated at 189,000, so there’s been a large fall following the vote.

Obviously other countries are going to make up a higher percentage of those immigrating, but the total amount of immigrants is down according to that article.

You're comparing two years which were both when we were in the EU, and also ignoring non-EU immigration, and trying to draw some conclusion from this?

Not sure what your quote is supposed to say. It doesn't mention anything about total net migration. This is from Steptember 2022 about immigration to the UK: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...

If you look at that report you will notice that the main change to net migration was Covid-19 and even with that, it's pretty steady but you can see that EU migration is down significantly but completely compensated by non EU immigrants (page 16).

I was searching for this to reference in my post, lost inside my bookmarks. Thank you.

I think that has always been part of the plan. The issue with EU was that the "immigrants" were acually citizens of the union which means the EU guaranteed them the same rights as british nationals.

There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK. For some reasons a big part of the UK didn't like that for obvious reasons.

> There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK.

Source for this please? As far as I understood it is extremely difficult for such people to get Italian citizenship and had never heard of this as an issue

I can't find the exact article. For some reasons "everything" pre-brexit about immigration has been buried by Google. However the route of African migrants through Italy to the UK was well known before Brexit.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/african-migr...

You are mixing two things: Yes, illegal immigrants get into Italy from the Mediterranean sea. From there they move to north Europe, but this is far from getting Italian citizen and have the freedom to move in EU. However is sometimes very easy for many south americans to get Italian citizenship thanks to our dumb citizen law that grant citizenship to anyone who could prove to have kind of remote Italian ancestor

I know what you are saying but I'm not conflating these separate issues.

The argument was made that UK cannot control its borders from non-EU immigrants because Italy at the time was giving them enough papars so they could travel legally to the UK.

To be honest I cannot recall for sure if they were getting instant italian citizenship or just some form of residency. However in the end they could even get british citizenship because they would live in the UK long enough(i believe it's 5 years) using the EU papers. There was benefits fraud as well.

Unfortunately I cannot find the articles anymore. It's almost like a conspiracy that everything regarding immigration before Brexit is no longer search-able(I know it's just Google's algo discarding old news). Immigration was the issue number 1 for the british people before Brexit. I beleive it's not over yet as european politicians are still ignoring people's concerns on immigration.

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