What’s the most important story in Britain over the last 25 years? The financial crisis? Brexit? These events both changed our country dramatically. But neither has had such a big impact on the make-up of Britain than immigration.
In 1991, Britain’s foreign-born residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population. In 2021, one in six people (16.8 per cent) living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, according to Census data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. The pace of change is both staggering and accelerating. Some four in ten of that foreign-born population arrived over the last decade. To put this into context, from 1981 to 1990, total net migration of non-UK citizens totalled 445,000. The ONS says that 680,000 foreign-born residents arrived in 2020-21 alone (although this will include those who left the UK, then returned).
This flow has not been evenly distributed across the country; in parts of London like Newham, Harrow, Ealing, and Brent, people born outside the UK now outnumber those born within.
