Speaking about this subject, Braverman, who was home secretary under Rishi Sunak between 2022 and 2023, told us: “The broader objection that I would get from the prime minister and from the chancellor of the exchequer and other ministers, was that if we were going to cut immigration, then we would be actually cutting revenue”.
She told us of “one conversation I had along the lines of, ‘Well, Suella, if you want to halve net migration to 300,000, you realise that’s going to cost us £3 billion. That’s the same as a cut to income tax.’”
Former Immigration Minister Jenrick described a discussion he once had with Prime Minister Sunak: “He put forward the argument that mass migration was a good thing because undercutting British workers’ wages was helping to bring down inflation. I was shocked.”
Sunak did not wish to comment on Jenrick’s recollection of their conversation but former Home Secretary James Cleverly argues against any suggestion that Sunak didn’t want to deliver on cutting legal migration: “The figures that came out in August of this year showed that year on year, every single metric that I was responsible for – illegal migration, net migration, asylum application numbers, growth rates, deportation rates – every single one of those accountability lines was trending in the right direction.”
But given the difficulties predicting the ebbs and flows of migration, how did numbers become so fundamental to the whole immigration debate?
It was politicians who made that call, in part responding to public pressure. But it was also made possible, in part, by the emergence of a research and campaign group named Migration Watch.
