Is the UK facing an “invasion” of immigrants?

At the beginning of November, Home Secretary Suella Braverman claimed England is facing an “invasion” of immigrants arriving in small boats on the southern coast. Speaking to the House of Commons, she said more than 40,000 people have crossed the Channel so far this year. Where do these numbers fit in the general context of refugee migration across the UK, Europe, and the world?

Refugee charities criticised Braverman for her inflammatory language. Care4Calais said her comment was “highly offensive”, and Refugee Action said it “puts so many people at risk”. Braverman talked about a refugee invasion just days after a man with “an extreme right wing motivation”, according to the police, threw two gasoline bombs at the Dover migrant centre in what the police described as “a terrorist incident”.

It is true that the UK is receiving the highest numbers of asylum applications in a decade. The country experienced the biggest wave of asylum seekers in the early 2000s when the conflict in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and former Yugoslavia drove their residents to flee their homes. In 2002, the UK recorded over 100,000 applications for asylum, almost double of the applications compared to the last year.

Chart 1: Number of asylum applications and positive initial decisions on the applications in the UK. Source: Home Office Immigration Statistics.

After a steep drop beginning in 2003, it would not be until the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015 that the UK would experience another significant increase in asylum applications. More than one million refugees came to Europe, most of them ending up in Germany. 

The numbers of asylum applications kept rising until the Covid-19 crisis hit the world in 2020, when they fell down by 21% compared to 2019. Since then, they have been on the rise again: 58,532 people applied for asylum in 2021, and 34,286 have applied in the first half of 2022.

However, the number of applications does not translate to the number of asylum seekers being granted refugee status. The number of positive initial decisions is much lower than the number of applications received every year. Not all applications received get decided on in the same year either, as the figures from the Refugee Council reveal that more than 40,000 asylum seekers have been waiting for up to three years for their decision.

Although the UK numbers may seem high, they are thwarted by other European countries, mainly Germany. The continental country with a population 22% bigger and GDP 32% higher than the UK has received more than 2m asylum applications over the last decade, almost six times the number of applications the UK has received in the same time. 

Chart 2: Number of asylum applications in the top 10 European countries with the highest number of applications in 2021. Source: Eurostat.

After zooming out further onto the world scale and comparing the number of refugees hosted by countries in 2021, the proportion of refugees hosted by the UK was dwarfed by the giants of Turkey, Colombia, Uganda, Pakistan, and Germany.

Refugees also present only a part of the 89.3 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). They include 53.2 million internally displaced people – refugees who have not travelled from their home country.

UNHCR likewise stated in their annual Global Trends report that 83% of refugees are hosted in low-income and middle-income countries, and 72% are hosted in neighbouring countries, shifting the axis of the refugee crisis from Europe to the Global South.

Chart 3: Top five countries in the world hosting the highest number of refugees (including Venezuelans displaced abroad) in 2021 compared with the number of refugees hosted in the UK in the same year. Source: UNHCR Global Trends 2021.

Another of Braverman’s claims caused a diplomatic row with Albania. After Braverman accused Albanian asylum seekers of abusing the system and “making spurious claims that they are ‘modern slaves’”, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said that Braverman treats his citizens as scapegoats to “excuse policy failures”. 

The rhetoric of accusing asylum seekers of being “economic migrants” was repeated by Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick when he promised to end “Hotel Britain” for people travelling to Britain for “asylum shopping”.

4,754 Albanian nationals presented 8% of the 58,532 asylum seekers who sought asylum in the UK last year. 18% of the asylum seekers came from Iran, 14% from Iraq, and 9% from Eritrea. The Home Office registered 4,729 applications from Albanians in the first half of this year, indicating that the number of Albanian asylum seekers is indeed rising. 

Chart 4: Percentage of asylum seekers from different countries in the overall number of applications for asylum in the UK in 2021. Source: Home Office Immigration Statistics.

All these nationalities have vastly different success rates in their cases being granted a positive decision by the Home Office, and hence granted the status of a refugee.

While more than 9 in 10 people from Syria are granted refugee status, the success rate goes down to around 8 in 10 people for Eritreans, Iranians, and Sudanese, and 7 in 10 for Afghans and Vietnamese. Half of asylum seeker applications from Iraqis are accepted, and Albanians have a success rate of only about 35%.

However, as the Independent revealed, “most Albanian asylum seekers granted UK visas are trafficked women”.

Chart 5: Percentage of asylum seekers from different countries ultimately granted asylum or other leave in the share of applications (main applicants) received from 2017 to 2019 included. Source: The Migration Observatory.

Although there might be a high number of economic migrants arriving at the UK shores, the number does not negate the claims of refugees in genuine need of protection. These high numbers likewise appear to shrink when compared to the intake of refugees across Europe and the flow of displaced people around the world.