Is Immigration Britain’s Jizya?

Britain’s porous borders and permissive asylum policies are being exploited by radical Islamists interested in conquest, not coexistence

Britain’s immigration system is being exploited by radical Islamists for conquest, not coexistence—at taxpayer expense and cultural cost.

New ONS figures show that annual net migration halved from 806,000 to 431,000 in 2024. The provisional estimate for total migration has fallen from 1.326 million in 2023 to 948,000 in 2024. Emigration is up by 11%, to 517,000 — largely driven by European (218,000) and British (77,000) nationals. They were replaced by 544,000 (81%) new non-EU arrivals — continuing the trend of unprecedented, culturally distant demographic change since immigration laws were liberalized after Brexit. Work visas for non-EU applicants fell by 49% (-108,000); work dependents by 35% (-81,000); and study dependents by 86% (-105,000).

Source: Office for National Statistics (22 May 2025)

While the Labour government and its unimpressive cheerleaders such as Mike Tapp are taking a victory lap, nothing they did since the July general election led to this. Loathe though I am to attribute competence to the last Conservative government, the fall in student and care worker dependent visas are due to their efforts to mitigate a disaster of their own making. Labour’s proposed changes to the immigration system have not yet gone into effect. Also, net migration running at >400,000 is nothing to brag about. It’s like defecating in the bathtub, then cheering when you switch to just urinating instead. The tub is still filling up, and you’re still sitting in it.

Douglas Murray has written that immigration is always a question of quality, quantity, and pace. Allow me to add “desire” too, given, when the government bothers to consult them, the British public have voted to reduce immigration in every election since 1974. 90% of constituencies wanted less migration before the last election, and that’s when underestimating net-migration by a factor of 10. While immigration has reduced in quantity and slowed in pace, it has not improved in quality, nor gained new democratic assent. And attitudes are unlikely to change, given the profile of new arrivals. 157,000 Indian, 76,000 Pakistani, 70,000 Chinese, and 52,000 Nigerian nationals comprised the largest share. Zimbabweans, the fifth largest group in 2023 (36,000), seem to have stopped coming after they could no longer admittedly game the system by bringing 10 dependents for every one health-and-social-care worker. But the likelihood that this year’s intake will be an economic boon to Britain is still low, as 95% of visas issued to the same nations in 2023 were to net-tax recipients.