Net migration is the number of people who entered the UK.
No. Net migration is immigration minus emigration. It is a balance between two much larger numbers, not a count of arrivals.
Common claims
Where a claim misuses a definition, a denominator or a time period, we say so, and we apply the same test in every direction.
These are propositions that circulate in public debate, not quotations attributed to particular people. A claim qualifies for this page only if it demonstrably circulates, if the error in it is statistical rather than political, if our sources can settle it, and if we would apply the same test to the opposite claim.
The current set corrects ten restrictionist claims and four pro-migration ones. That is not an even split and we are not going to present it as one. Restrictionist misuses circulate more, so a set forced to fifty-fifty would misrepresent the field.
A check enforces a floor: at least two claims in each direction. A set that only ever corrected one side would fail it. We previously capped either direction at two-thirds, and removed that cap when it blocked us from adding "immigrants are a drain on the public finances", the correction a reader sympathetic to migration would most want to see. A rule that prevents you correcting a claim is measuring the wrong thing.
Judge the balance by reading the corrections, not counting them.
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Most immigration is asylum seekers.
No. Asylum applicants were around 14% of non-EU+ arrivals in the year ending December 2025. Non-EU+ is a nationality grouping rather than a route: people who are not British and not nationals of the EU, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Switzerland. Study and work were both larger.
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Immigrants pay more in tax than they cost.
Not established as a general claim. Pre-Brexit studies found fiscal effects smaller than 1% of GDP in magnitude, but the results differ substantially by migrant group, period, comparison and method. There is no equivalent estimate covering the whole post-Brexit immigration system.
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Everyone in asylum accommodation arrived recently.
The figures do not show that. The accommodation total counts everyone being accommodated on a single day. It is a stock, not a flow, and it does not record when anyone arrived.
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19% of the UK population was born abroad.
Roughly right now, but not as an exact, current, official figure. ONS's provisional mid-2024 estimate is close to it, but that estimate is an official statistic in development, ONS publishes no percentage of its own, and there is no 2026 count. The figures, and what each one rests on, are on this page.
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Almost all refused asylum seekers are eventually recognised as refugees.
No. Later decisions, appeals and reconsiderations do raise the grant rate substantially, but not to almost all: of the claims made between 2010 and 2020 that reached a grant or a refusal, between a fifth and a half stood at a refusal at their latest recorded outcome. An allowed appeal is also not the same as refugee recognition.
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Immigrants are a drain on the public finances.
Not established as a general claim. Pre-Brexit studies of the migrant population found fiscal effects smaller than 1% of GDP in magnitude, but their results vary with the period, migrant group, comparison and method. No equivalent analysis covers the whole post-Brexit immigration system.
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Falling net migration means the asylum system is shrinking.
No. They are different systems, measured differently, and they have not moved together. Net migration has fallen a long way since its peak, while asylum claims stayed near their record. One queue inside the asylum system did shrink; the appeals queue behind it grew.
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A refusal means the original claim was obviously false.
Not necessarily. A refusal records that the legal test was not met on the evidence before the decision-maker, which is not the same as a finding that the account was untrue. For claims made between 2007 and 2022 the Home Office puts the grant rate at the latest outcome 8 to 29 percentage points above the initial rate, so refusals are overturned at scale. Most still stand, which is what the mirror claim gets wrong.
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The asylum backlog is one number.
No. There are several queues at different stages, counted by different bodies on different bases, and they have lately moved in opposite directions. Even a single queue is two numbers: the wait for a first decision is published both as a count of people and as a count of cases, and the people figure is about a quarter larger.
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Small boat arrivals are the whole asylum system.
No. Small boats are one way of arriving, and the asylum system is a set of decisions, appeals, support and returns that a count of arrivals does not measure. Over the same year there were fewer than half as many boat arrivals as asylum claims, and even that comparison is looser than it looks, because arriving and claiming are two different events counted separately.
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Visa grants equal arrivals.
Not necessarily. A visa is permission to travel, not a record that anyone travelled. Some are never used, some are extensions granted to people already here, and the unit counted is the grant rather than the person. Visa grants come from the Home Office and count decisions; immigration estimates come from ONS and count people who moved and stayed. The two are not versions of the same number and are not meant to match.
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Asylum hotels cost £8 million a day.
Check the figure and the year before repeating it. About £8 million a day is close to the Home Office's own average for 2023-24, a financial year that ended in March 2024. The same page of the same accounts gives a materially lower average for 2024-25. Both are hotels only, and hotels are one part of the bill: the National Audit Office's whole-system total is larger again, and no publisher states a daily average for it. The current figures, each with its source and date, are on this page.
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The average migrant contributes £341,000 over their lifetime.
No such figure is published. It is read off one line of one Office for Budget Responsibility chart, for a migrant arriving at 25 on the average wage and modelled with no dependants, and its size depends entirely on the age you stop counting at. OBR states no single value and singles out no age. This site reads the same line at a different age and publishes a lower figure, which is the whole problem with quoting either as a fact about the average migrant.
What this page does not cover
Crime and migration. The statistics are genuinely difficult: nationality is recorded inconsistently across the criminal justice system, the right denominator is contested because migrant and non-migrant populations differ in age and sex profile, and the honest answer to most versions of the question is that the published data cannot settle it. We would rather say that than publish a number we cannot stand behind.
Scope silence is indistinguishable from bias, so we state this exclusion rather than leave it to be noticed. More on what this site does not cover.
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