by William Yarwood, media campaign manager
Here’s a quote for you: “The theory that higher migration necessarily leads to higher growth doesn’t hold based on the evidence”. You’d be forgiven if you thought those words came from Nigel Farage, or perhaps Kemi Badenoch. But no — those were the exact words of Prime Minister Keir Starmer as he spoke to the press about his latest immigration policy plans.
Launching his new white paper on immigration reform, Starmer sounded more like a GB News panellist than the leader of the Labour Party. English proficiency requirements, tougher deportation powers, work visa restrictions, the list goes on, seemingly a list of policies seeking to fix Britain’s broken borders.
Of course, anyone who’s spent more than five minutes reading the details can see that his policy proposals don’t quite match the tough-talking tone (Karl Williams from the Centre for Policy Studies has an excellent piece on this), but, in my view, it's the rhetoric that matters. Because it reveals something striking: the Labour leader has effectively conceded that mass migration hasn’t made Britain richer and that the last government’s approach to migration wasn’t just a failure but an ‘open borders experiment’. It’s an admission that a slightly improving GDP does not necessarily mean a better country.
And what an experiment it was. Between 2022 and 2024, gross migration ran at over a million people a year, breaking net migration records. And the results speak for themselves. A broken housing market, stagnant wages, overwhelmed public services, and declining productivity. Growth, if you can call it that, came purely from inflating the headcount. Not from building a stronger, wealthier country.
The economic case for mass migration - long touted as the core reason to be in favour of it - has collapsed. And, minus a few holdouts on the progressive left and the libertarian right, hardly anyone is still trying to defend it. Even Starmer has adopted arguments that would have made you a political pariah a few short years ago.
The opposition to mass immigration from the British public is palpable, and Labour has noticed. According to a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, nearly half of the British public want a freeze on net migration altogether — either through a one-in-one-out model, or by reducing the numbers outright.
That’s why, at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we’re calling on the government to make GDP per capita the main economic metric, not overall GDP. Because, yes, more people in the country will grow the economy in raw numbers. But it won’t make people richer. That growth rarely reaches ordinary households. Especially when so many recent arrivals are students, dependents, or not working at all.
The current model erodes the social contract. Taxpayers are footing the bill for a system that’s open to abuse, drives down real wages, and pulls communities apart. A high-immigration, low-productivity economy doesn’t make Britain stronger - it makes it poorer and less cohesive.
So while I remain deeply sceptical of Starmer’s white paper and Labour’s actual commitment to reform, his rhetorical shift matters. It’s a sign that the terms of debate are finally moving. And that’s a win in itself.
Because if even a Labour prime minister is now forced to admit that mass migration doesn’t deliver prosperity, then perhaps Westminster is finally beginning to catch up with the rest of the country.