UK Immigration Crisis 2025: Why Voters Rank It Above the Economy. Syed Mohsin Abbas Explain

Immigration has now surpassed the economy as the UK public’s top concern for the first time since Brexit, signalling a dramatic shift in voter priorities. With record migration figures, rising public anxiety, and a polarised media narrative, the issue is reshaping Britain’s political landscape. Joining us is Syed Mohsin Abbas, journalist and political commentator, to examine the deeper forces driving this debate — from corporate interests to government policy — and what it means for the future of UK politics and society.

1- Why do you think immigration has overtaken the economy as the top concern for UK voters, and what factors have contributed to this shift since Brexit?

 So the UK immigration figures that have just been released seem to indicate that there’s been a three quarters of a million rise in the number of immigrants that have come into the country. That’s essentially the biggest annual population jump in 75 years. And the question has to be asked why a government, which knows very well that the immigration issue has become such a major concern within the British public, would not do something to prevent that happening.

In fact, in the background, it’s quite clear that most of this immigration is done on quite an organized basis in collaboration with the neoliberal transnational corporations. And much of the workers who come in and who are needed are essentially required by these large transnational corporations. And the government and the state consecutive governments of the British state have all kowtowed to this neoliberal transnational corporate interest, as they do with virtually every one of their policies, whether it’s to do with war, trade, or the ecology.

Political governance in the West is very much controlled by these kinds of forces, as well, of course, as Zionists, that lobby itself. These two are probably the most powerful lobby groups within the state apparatus, or the ones that can at least influence the state apparatus here in Britain. So that’s the first factor. Other factors that come into it are, for instance, the Brexit paradox, the reality of what happened after Brexit seems to be having a major impact because people feel that there are unfulfilled promises and that, you know, the whole immigration has continued to skyrocket in spite of the vote to get out of Europe.

So this creates a powerful political paradox, voters who are promised that leaving the EU would mean lower immigration, but the opposite actually happened. So that’s something that’s going to fuel frustration among the masses when clearly it was a 50 percent of the country more or less found the whole issue of being attached to Europe a problem, which was very much about also immigration and migration even at that time. So there have also been these very well-highlighted, well, deliberate media focus focal points on small boats.

Now, small boats in reality form a very, very tiny number of illegal immigrants that arrive in the UK, yet it was exaggerated by the Anglo-Zionist imperialist media to basically create the impression that all these people are getting in with these little small boats. It also turns out that those small boats, some of them were actually owned, if not quite a lot of them, were owned by large transnational corporations like BlackRock.

That was something which popped up on some reports as well. So whether there’s complicity again from transnationals and the state itself in covertly allowing these small boats in, that’s also a question that needs to be asked. So this has also given this kind of narrative strength to see these people coming in on the boats, when in reality, most of the immigration which is there is illegal. It’s sanctioned by government and it’s applied for.

Large companies here, retail companies, just need to go to their retail outlets and you’ll see Indian immigrant workers, for instance, or in many other firms, you’ll see other ethnicities that have arrived. They’re not illegal. They’ve been given carte blanche by these economic powers because these workers come from abroad and are willing to work for low pay, minimum wage, and they do jobs which quite often the British public doesn’t want to do because it’s hard work, long hours, and minimal financial return.

But for somebody coming from, say, India, for instance, or Bangladesh or Africa, who are getting that minimum wage here, that means a lot more to them because they have families back in India they perhaps have to support or they don’t have huge overheads here. They can live in bedsits, two or three people in a flat or something and minimise their overheads and be able to save up enough money to have a decent lifestyle for their families back home. Whereas for the same wage, the average British person can’t usually survive even on one job.

That’s because for 20 years, the government essentially, along with the corporations again, has restricted pay rises while at the same time you’ve had maybe anything up to 200% increase in the cost of living over those 20 years. Maybe a lot more, I haven’t checked the exact figures, but what’s for sure is cost of living has far, far, far outstripped the actual wages. So people’s ability to afford things that they could 20, 30 years ago simply isn’t there and that’s frustrating people as well.

So the other factors that come in in terms of accounting for this rise in immigration as the major issue of our economies is actually possibly economic as well because from jobs to resources that’s like what people talk about during periods of austerity and a severe cost of living crisis is what concerns folk and the debate around immigration shifts.

The question becomes less about whether they’re taking our jobs these immigrants and it becomes more of a one of straining the public services. So like these immigrants are coming in and using the NHS and basically putting a pressure on our housing, on our schools, our accommodation and everything gets blamed on the migrants because they’re using resources that are so-called meant only for British citizens.

So that’s a kind of narrative which really resonates with a lot of people who are already discontrolled and probably frustrated at not having incomes or having their lifestyle reduced in terms of what they can enjoy. The other thing of course is that the parties, the government at the centre, neoliberal parties whether they were Tory or Labour have all seemed to deliberately ignore this for some reason which I’ve already outlined because they prefer to feed the needs of the corporate private industry sector rather than the people and I think consistently because they’ve ignored it you’ve got the rise of a party reform which has used this immigration issue as its main battle cry.

So they’ve recognised that there’s a real deep underlying fear and they’ve exacerbated it with their campaigns and their political direction and they’ve shifted the conversation even more to the blame game on migrants and of course in the background we have the influence of the US constantly of course whatever happens in the US tends to spill over to Europe pretty soon. So Donald Trump consistently over there with the Marjah movement talking about the make America great again scenario and targeting the immigrants with the ICE authorities that they’ve set up and the way they’re doing it.

Those images translate over to European countries and Britain gets influenced by that as well and I think that it’s also something that think tanks the neoconservative neoliberal think tanks promote because what better way to make people get distracted from the rape of resources and the abuse of power by the rich in Britain or in the west than to create this alternative focus. So blame it all on the immigrants, blame it on the people right at the bottom who probably have the least impact and power to do anything that they’re being accused of and take away the blame from the rich and powerful who are the ones who are profiting from these immigrants and who are also wanting division, discord, distraction and why is that? Because those same neoliberal money power agencies are trying to roll out a new kind of system in the west and that system is focused on digital surveillance, it’s focused on a kind of far more draconian totalitarian rule, it’s already undermining freedom of expression, freedom of speech, human rights through the terror laws that they’ve also been consistently rolling out using another psychological operation which is ISIS and Islamist terrorism.

It’s another tactic they’ve been using combined with climate change and now if you add to immigration all of this becomes a great, you know, it becomes a sort of concoction, a powerful concoction, explosive concoction for the public where resentment, division, hatred, fear, anxiety, hopelessness and general confusion which all of course now is being galvanized under the likes of reform and the far right so we to get this far right tendency who will who will increasingly gain ascendancy because of this.

2- How should the UK government respond to rising public concern about immigration without compromising human rights or international obligations?

Well, first of all, they should stop unnecessary immigration, which is being dictated by the corporates. They shouldn’t kowtow to any mass immigration organized on behalf of the transnationals. That’s straight away. There’s no need for it, given the current climate and the mood of the public. That would be a great vote winner, but it would put them in a clash with their masters who are the money men so they’re unlikely to do that.

The second thing they should do is of course stop wars on nations where people are immigrating from. I mean Britain has been involved in virtually every Middle Eastern war or West Asian war that the Americans have initiated or NATO has initiated over the last 50 years.

Everything from Iraq through to even the war that Saddam unleashed on Iran, through to the Bosnian scenarios, go further forward into the West Asian side again, it’s Libya and Afghanistan of course was a never-ending crisis as well of conflict which they were all involved in, even the British army. And latterly, Syria, very heavily involved again, deep state, British deep state, and the war on Iran, which the 12-Day War, again, the UK definitely was supporting Israeli forces one way or another there as well.

Often they don’t come to the front line these days, but they’re there logistically and communications-wise and intelligence-wise and supply-wise, weaponry-wise. So they’re involved in virtually every one of those wars and of course Lebanon they’ve been involved with is supporting Israel in its invasion or attempted invasion of Lebanon and they’re also involved with destabilizing Yemen, you know, both internally there within Yemen and also through the bombing campaigns the Americans and the Israelis have been conducting. So war on West Asia, particularly or the Muslim world has been a major cause for displacement of populations. migration has resulted. And of course, Libya, in particular, became the hotspot for migrants coming to Europe.

And of course, once they’re in Europe, they can spread all over. And that, of course, is going to impact Britain as well. But there would be far less migration if first of all, these the instability of those countries wasn’t exacerbated by British and Western forever wars, you know, conflict creation, color revolutions, destabilizing governments through assassinations, making sure that despots and dictators are in charge.

This is all part of what displaces communities because they can’t get safety, security politically. They can’t have necessarily economic security in those countries. And therefore they look to get out simply so they can help their children and their wives and families in those countries survive. But if the West, and particularly Britain, stopped their resource plunder, their obsession with colonizing and imperializing and dominating West Asian nations, they would find that they would have a huge reduction in immigration here in the West.

The other factor is that the focus and discipline that is required for people to actually do the jobs here in Britain, which the immigrants do, because let’s not forget the immigrants that come here do the worst jobs. They do the hardest, toughest, dirtiest, most unhealthy and, you know, job and most unhealthy, most incompatible with their natural human cycle. So many of these immigrants work late nights, all nights in hotels, for instance, in laundry jobs and as porters. Many of them will work as fruit pickers in farms. So basically, literally jobs which are English and British people don’t want to do.

So if they’re not going to do them, who will do those jobs? Will it just be that you don’t have any hotel cleaners? Is there a sort of shutdown of the hotels? And then what will happen? to their tourist industry, where they make a lot of money, again, from foreigners and people who are coming here to visit London, for instance. So these are all questions that they have to also work out. And the answer, I guess, is that, first of all, people need to be trained to do those jobs, and they shouldn’t be Perhaps they should be more humble and be able to do those jobs. Or the other answer is to more, which is more humane, is to raise the salaries for the toughest jobs, those kinds of hard jobs. And then perhaps that would attract the local British people to actually do the night porter jobs and the cleaning, cleaners jobs and the jobs which are least desirable.

And then you would need immigrants to come in and fill those gaps and the transnational corporations wouldn’t need them but then that wouldn’t work for the transnational corporations because they don’t want to pay a bigger salaries because they’re greedy and they’re making profit so again the door the profiteering ethos of this society is fundamentally to blame and of course that transnational corporations would rather have cheap labor from abroad than they have British people who don’t want to, who if they were to do the job would want a hugely greater amount of money.

Finally, the media should be asked to frame the discussions around immigration more sensibly, because currently those narratives are largely racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and essentially fearmongering. And that’s also been achieved through the stereotype that the media has deliberately been engaged with the British state. around Muslims and around terrorism and around the idea of Islam being a problem. So there are these huge underlying narratives which have been going on for well over 30 years now, Salman Rushdie onwards, they’ve had this incessant brainwashing of the Western public to fear Muslims, fear foreigners and fear, you know, Muslim immigrants in particular. So there is a huge anti-Islamic or Islamophobic environment of hatred which has been built up.

So that of course is what they’re really talking about. Because if you ask the average person who objects to immigration, if you said to them, you know, they were Australian immigrants or they were Irish immigrants or they were, you know, European immigrants, there doesn’t seem to be quite such a big objection to them as there is to the notion of brown or black immigrants, for sure.

So there’s a there’s a racial undertone here, which is basically used by the media and is really being pushed amongst the far-right movement so that they can say look we’re not being racist we’re just against immigration but in reality the real issue is that there’s a fundamental racism which is being fanned and fueled and significant swathes of the British society are buying into it and subliminally they can do it without seeming like they’re racist but that’s essentially what it is so this is another factor.

3- How do public perceptions of immigration’s social impact compare with its economic contributions to the UK?

 Public perception tends to vastly underestimate the economic contributions of immigrants while focusing overwhelmingly on perceived social negatives. Although immigrants play a crucial role in the UK economy — including taking on the lowest-paid, most undesirable jobs that keep essential services like the NHS functioning — these contributions are largely ignored by both the media and politicians. The general public often does not recognize or acknowledge these benefits. Instead, many believe that immigrants are a burden, taking jobs and overusing public services, despite evidence to the contrary. This disconnect results in a heavily one-sided public perception where the positive economic impact of immigration is overshadowed by unfounded or exaggerated social concerns.

 4- To what extent has media coverage shaped public opinion on immigration, and is this perception accurate relative to data and research?

 Media coverage has significantly shaped public opinion on immigration, often in a negative and misleading way. The media tends to highlight rare but sensationalist cases — such as crimes committed by immigrants — while largely ignoring similar offenses by native Britons or more systemic issues. For example, crimes committed by immigrants are often disproportionately covered, especially in cases involving race or ethnicity, creating a distorted image that immigrants are more prone to criminal behavior. Meanwhile, large-scale scandals involving prominent British figures, like Jimmy Savile or Prince Andrew, receive comparatively less scrutiny. This selective reporting fuels public fear and resentment, creating an inaccurate and racially biased perception of immigration that is not supported by broader data and research, which often show immigrants as net contributors to society.

5- What are the main challenges facing integration of migrants into UK society, and how can policy or community initiatives address these effectively?

 Well, the main challenge is integration. Clearly, of course, you know, when you bring in a large number of immigrants, language is the first thing, you know, language classes in schools, one would assume that they would have to do that. Where do they house these communities? Do they start creating ghetto communities? Do they go into the poorest boroughs where there’s least finances? And if so, when they end up in those boroughs, there’s even more overcrowding and lack of, you know, facilities and a strain on the local city. So, you know, they aren’t helping themselves because that’s invariably what happens.

Most of the people are housed in these areas where there’s already a lot of economic issues. And of course, these days, there’s also the whole issue of hotels has been highlighted by the right, far right, where immigrants are being housed in hotels. And somehow that’s become a huge big deal, because, you know, the locals are being whipped up to make it look like they’re part of a, they’re subject to an invasion.

Again, it’s a lot of exaggeration. you know, so much so in terms of impact that I think today there was one of these centres where their asylum seekers housed was burned. They started to burn and attack these centres as well. This is a targeted far-right organised response. And the far right itself has strong Zionist connections, and there’s a feeling now increasingly that this is part of a movement which the Zionists and the Israelis and the Mossad are also utilizing against the Western states.

They’re basically making them feel like Muslims are a problem, Arabs are a problem, and they’re trying to attach the Zionist flag, et cetera, the Israelis flag, to all these far-right movements and creating alliances with them because they want far-right leaders in power because they’re more likely to support Israel. So again the immigration issue is something which is becoming a common necessity for Zionists as well as these far right and their alliance like Tommy Robinson and his ilk I mean at the last march was very welcoming of Zionist participation and that was quite prominent.

Zionists were very much at the heart of the movement. So there’s a strong suspicion that the far right and all this immigration issue is also something with which Israel and the Zionist movement as a whole is deliberately exacerbating. So yeah there’s a big issue there as well. Of course, you know, once you have these communities coexisting, and if you suddenly have an influx of a new batch of people from a different part of the world, it becomes visibly obvious. And then, of course, if you house them largely within English communities who have that xenophobia and racism, then they and they see these other foreigners turning up.

That’s going to create resentment as well, and that is something that, you know, helps to push them even further towards the right and to supporting the far right movements. Of course, you know, getting community liaison groups, interaction between those new immigrant groups and the English fraternity in particular, or the indigenous British fraternity would be very important. But again, because there’s a lack of resources, there’d be very little community work in terms of bridge building or trying to get people to socialize with each other between these groups.

And so then what you end up is with Islands and pockets of ethnicities that stick to their own communities which is very natural and they don’t really have a big social scene going on which is going to overlap with the mainstream and therefore the mainstream gets more suspicious And they also use that as a way of justifying their own racism and their own xenophobia even more. It’s like the other becomes the one that you need to blame. But because there’s no real work going on on the ground in terms of integrating these communities together, that’s clearly another problem.

I don’t think there’s at all any intention to integrate them because the corporate companies don’t care. They just want them to come in and do their work, go home. And the immigrants themselves if they don’t speak the language so well they’re not going to be able to reach out and there’s a natural divide which is there to be exploited.

6- How might this shift in voter priorities influence future elections, party strategies, and UK immigration policy in the coming years?

The final question, number six. Well, of course, it’s going to have a profound effect on British politics. It already is. Reform are already leading all the polls. And Nigel Farage, its leader, is touted to become the new prime minister. So at the moment, the way things stand, the immigration issue has become the number one issue. The right wing Reform Party is the number one benefactor of this movement.

Of this shift of public emphasis in policy and quite frankly it looks like that’s pretty unstoppable given that people like Nigel Starmer etc don’t really genuinely want to make the immigration issue a big deal because they’re constantly serving the economic interests of their Private sector and the corporate companies. So that will only lead to more voters turning away from Starmer.

But in the meantime, what Starmer and the centre-left are already doing is they’re clandestinely and now overtly also bringing in digital ID. I mean, it’s just been announced that Britain will be adopting the BRIC card, which is the digital ID, which will bring people all into one Mass surveillance network. And as a result of this kind of thing, what they’re using is the excuse of immigration. He literally, Starmer literally today was saying that they were introducing the ID card because it would help them to reduce immigration because they could monitor immigrants more clearly.

I mean, it’s an absolute nonsense argument. It’s really just another use of immigrants as a way of bringing in more totalitarian Surveillance capitalism, essentially. So they’re now using the immigrants and the fear of immigrants as a way of reducing The British public’s natural freedoms and privacy. And again, it’s these kinds of very narrow-minded xenophobes in the far right who are helping to facilitate it and people like Starmer who are under orders to do this because the digital ID will actually serve the deep state. It’ll serve the corporate companies because they can have access to all our information and data information is power, it’s money, and the government is going to facilitate more Power for not only themselves, but also these corporate companies will be able to access what people are doing, who they’re doing, when they should collect their money, where they should collect their money, how they should move.

15-minute cities are part of that digital programming. All of this is not good news for the ordinary public, but a lot of them are walking in blind because they’re being emotional about reacting to False flags, essentially, and the immigration issue is a false flag because it’s being engineered and orchestrated by the deep state and the money mafias in order to Keep people distracted while they implement the digital surveillance totalitarian state that they require. They want more like a Chinese version of how to run things, which is very much more kind of totalitarian hands-on process.

And it will also usher in a greater depopulation based on The fact that AI and robots and all the modern technology can do the jobs so people will become increasingly dispensable and unnecessary and the more they can be watched and surveyed and more they can be controlled and the less jobs there are the more virtual reality there is the more leisure activities are created that’s closer to what they’re trying to engineer now because of the new scenarios that are emerging in the kind of world they want.