Here’s Why So Many People Are Moving to the U.K.

From 2004 to 2017, about 600,000 people moved to Britain each year. In 2022, that figure jumped to 1.163 million, an all-time high and a figure that is unlikely to be matched soon.

There were big increases last year in the number of people fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine (more than 120,000 Ukrainians have moved to Britain since the war began in February 2022), the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan and the growing crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong. Britain has humanitarian visa programs specifically for those groups.

But those flows already show signs of subsiding. And some of last year’s surge might have been movement that would have occurred earlier but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, when migration dropped.

Until a few years ago, migration from the European Union accounted for most of the influx of people to Britain. But after Brexit took away the automatic right of E.U. citizens to settle in Britain, the numbers fell sharply, last year accounting for less than 8 percent of the total.

Emigration from Britain has grown in recent years, much of it by E.U. citizens returning home.

While the current Conservative government has long voiced its opposition to the high levels of migration, Britain has major labor shortages, particularly in health care, social services and agriculture, partly because of Brexit.