The Labour party’s government’s vow to crack down on illegal immigrations since coming to the power in July 2024 is coming true. As per the data released on 9 January, 2025 by the UK Home Office in an official statement 16,400 people (foreign criminals and immigration offenders) were removed from the UK surpassing the highest rate of removals since 2018. 2,580 foreign criminals have been removed from the UK up by 23% from the last year. Bespoke charter flights including 4 of the biggest return flights have been used to remove immigration offenders. 4 biggest return flights carrying more than 800 people is the biggest number in the UK’s history
On 9 January the government has also announced the introduction of a new landmark border security legislation. The objective behind this legislation would be to prevent, combat, deter and disrupt irregular migration, cracking down on gangs making money by supporting illegal migrants entering the UK in small boats. The government has also increased visits by 32% by the officials at the dodgy car washes, nail bars and construction sites and exploitative employers’ places. This has resulted in 29% more arrests compared to same period last year.
Labour administration led by the Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier scrapped the previous conservative government’s plan to deport the illegal immigrants across the English Channel to Rwanda through small boats. This has resulted in the removal of 16,400 people which a 24% increase in enforced returns year-on-year. The increase in removal of immigration offenders has overturned the broken immigration system of the UK which saw a dramatic decline in removals in the last 10 years. Government’s effort to expedite asylum processing to reduce the backlog and redeploying 1,000 staff to work on immigration enforcement, has enabled them to achieve this level of removals in quick time of 6 months after coming to office. This also releases the pressure from hotels housing asylum seekers.
The action by the government has the support of UK voters. The reason for this is that official data says that in in the year to July 2023 the net immigrants coming to the UK were numbered at 906,000 far higher than first thought. Though this number fell down to 728,000 the next year this is still a big concern for the voters because the huge number of migrants coming to the UK is putting big pressure on dwindling housing, education and healthcare systems of the UK.
It would be interesting to see what more actions the government in the power takes to control illegal immigration along with removing illegal immigrants already present in the UK.