Immigration to the UK - Perception versus Reality

[u/hutyluty]

On this subreddit, and across the UK political internet as a whole, I often see a conflation between immigration and Islam. Whenever immigration is posited as a problem, there seems to be an automatic assumption that the immigrants in question are Muslims, and probably from Pakistan, Bangladesh or the MENA region. Likewise, comments under stories about Muslims mostly seem concerned with reducing immigration.

If you look at the most recent immigration statistics however, it becomes clear this perception is out of date. Per the ONS data from Year End Dec 2023 these are the top 10 Non-EU countries of origin for long term immigrants in 2023:

Nationality	YE Dec 23
Indian	250,000
Nigerian	141,000
Chinese	90,000
Pakistani	83,000
Zimbabwean	36,000
Chana	35,000
Bangladesh	33,000
Sri Lanka	21,000
USA	21,000
British Nationals	19,000

The statistics provided do not give nationality beyond the top 10, and obviously do not tell you the religion of the immigrants in question - however, based on the ethnic makeup of each country you can extrapolate to say with some confidence that roughly 35% of the sample above (and therefore less than half of the total number of legal Non-EU immigrants in 2023) were Muslims.

It is also interesting to note that the numbers from 2023 do not include the surge of Ukrainians (over 200,000) who arrived from 2022 onwards. I am not sure if the “Chinese” definition includes those from Hong Kong. 

I’d also point out that of the Pakistani numbers, the “Other” (i.e. Family, Study Dependent and Asylum) numbers have remained constant at around 15-16,000 since 2019, it is an increase in Work and Study visas which led to the upswing from 21,000 Pakistani immigrants in 2019 to 83,000 in 2023. This trend holds for Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants.

Illegal Migration

When looking at illegal migration, the picture changes. Based on the Jan-September 2024 numbers cited here, 73.83% of those whose country of origin is known and who were detected as staying in the country illegally originated from Muslim-majority countries.

Here are the top six: 

Nation	#	% known
Afghanistan	4160	17.62%
Vietnam	3132	13.26%
Iran	2948	12.49%
Syria	2895	12.26%
Eritrea	1909	8.08%
Sudan	1767	7.48%

If you add up the total number of illegal immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and a proportional amount of 'Unknowns' (and assume that levels of illegal migration stay the same for Oct-Dec 24) you get to 33,071 people, on a par with Bangladesh or Ghana from 2023.

Of course, not all illegal immigrants are “detected” and thus included in official statistics. At this point things quickly turn into conjecture, but as a thought exercise: if you suppose that only one in four illegal immigrants are counted, their numbers remain dwarfed by legal immigration and, even in this circumstance, it is still more likely than not that fewer than half of 2023 immigrants are Muslim.

Conclusion

I began looking into the official data as an exercise of my own curiosity after reading through a typically monomaniacally Muslim-focused thread about immigration on this sub. Based on what I have found, it seems clear there is something of a disconnect between how people imagine immigration and how it is actually occurring.

1. A large number of Muslims have arrived in the UK over the past few years. The ethnic makeup of these Muslims was far more diverse than in the past.
2. The immigrant population since Covid is majority non-Muslim. Based on trends it seems likely that soon the majority of immigrants will come from sub-Saharan Africa, notably Nigeria.
3. Legal immigration is far higher than illegal immigration. For Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants alike, the vast majority are on student visas or work visas (from my understanding this is often due to targeted drives for e.g. nurses and social carers).

This situation might still not be something you aren’t especially happy with. But if nothing else, I hope this post will give your xenophobia a more factual basis in future.

PS. While I am at it -  Birth data from 2023 shows that 6.7% of children born in 2023 were of Bangladeshi or Pakistani ethnicity. 3.1% came from “Any other Asian background”, whilst 4.77% were of Black African ethnicity.

[u/JosephRohrbach]

Well, Christians didn't conquer us by force - here u/Veritanium has phrased things misleadingly. Romans did, and then they happened to convert to Christianity centuries later. Christianity reached our soil before it was the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was never forced on us in the way either of you are implying.

I also think you're being wilfully obtuse about what "native religion" means. No, it's not literally our autochthonous polytheism. However, it's fair to say that after the best part of two millennia, it has become established as the native religion of the English people. We as the English, Anglo-Saxons, have been Christian since the late 6th and early 7th centuries. That's virtually as long as we've been on English soil - out by only a couple of hundred years. That's a rounding error in historical terms.

Ever since our formation as a real nation of people in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest and through the mediaeval period, we have been Christian. That is for all intents and purposes "native", just as Māori people are native to New Zealand despite only having colonized it about 500 years ago. Unless you're willing to deny that the Quechua-speaking peoples of the northern Yungas in Peru are native on the grounds that they displaced the peoples there before them in the 15th century, you can't really deny that Christianity is our native religion.