The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a new approach that is both compassionate and rational as figures from the Office for National Statistics released, Thursday May 25, 2023, showed that net migration to the UK reached 606,000 last year, these additional people are mainly from countries outside the European Union.
Denyer said: “Today’s discussion will be about the total number of migrants entering the UK, but we must never forget that every person coming to the UK is a human being with the same ambitions, dreams and hopes we all have.”
According to the Office’s estimates, in 2022 there were 1.2 million arrivals in the United Kingdom while 557,000 people left the country. Most people who arrived in the UK in 2022 came from non-EU countries (925,000). EU nationals are in second place, with 151,000 people.
These figures put pressure on the Conservative government which had promised to reduce immigration and “take back border control” after Brexit. “Everything shows that the government has completely lost control of our immigration system,” Labor MP Stephen Kinnock, in charge of the immigration file, criticized on Sky News television.
The Green Party, however, points out that these figures can also be misleading since more than a third of non-EU immigration is made up of international students who have been actively encouraged to come to the country and who will eventually return home. There are also thousands of Ukrainians and Hong Kongers, who have been sympathetically welcomed by the British people.
“As a rational step, the Greens support the separation of statistics between asylum seekers, students and jobseekers. We also welcome those looking to work in the UK, who often bring vital skills and help stimulate the economy. We would scrap minimum income rules for visas and want the UK to negotiate to join the EU’s free movement area,” the UK Green Party pleaded.
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer believes discussions on migration have become dominated by divisive rhetoric fueled by conservatives and right-wing media. Unlike Labour, “we are not afraid to challenge this narrative. We welcome the diversity that people from other countries and societies bring to our educational institutions, our workplaces and our communities,” argued Denyer.
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