Ten days ago, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, vowed to take “back control of our borders,” warning that uncontrolled immigration could result in the country “becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”On Thursday, the government estimated that net migration had dropped by almost half in 2024 compared to 2023, to 431,000, suggesting that Britain’s era of soaring immigration, far from worsening, was gradually coming to an end. The gap between Mr. Starmer’s alarming language and the numbers underscored how rising populism, fueled in Britain by the politics of Brexit, has twisted the debate on immigration, sometimes leaving it strangely disconnected from the facts. The sharp drop in net migration, which had been predicted, mainly reflected tighter measures on immigration put in place by the previous Conservative government, which faced acute pressure to reduce a surge that began after Brexit.
