Voting Labour Means Open Borders, Warns British Prime Minister Presiding Over Highest Immigration in History

A Labour government in Britain would lead to open borders, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warns, a paradoxical approach to the election given that’s exactly what the Tories in power have already delivered.

{snip} Just hours after British Prime Minster Rishi Sunak launched his campaign with a speech attacking the left-wing opposition for planning to increase migration, the government’s own statistical body revised up its migration figures again.

The figures for 2022, which had already been revised up from 606,000 to 745,000 net migrant arrivals in a recounting in Autumn 2023, today are now reckoned again to have been too low and are actually 764,000. The figure was already the highest levels of arrivals in British history ever, and is now even higher.

Net migration is achieved by subtracting emigration from migration, leaving the overall change. {snip}

The Conservative Party has sold itself as a party of border control to the public for decades, and promised at several elections in a row that it won that it would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, in other words fewer than 100,000 every year. Instead, the party used the promised opportunity to enact border control after Brexit to instead massively liberalise immigration rules, and instead is importing one million new people, net, every 18 months.

Nevertheless, the Conservatives insist Labour would be worse. Speaking in on Wednesday evening after he called the general election, Sunak warned Labour would undo the progress the Conservatives claim to have made.

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Warning of a less stable world, Sunak said “migration is being weaponised by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our borders”, which is true. But then he continued: “…it is we Conservatives, only we Conservatives who have that plan, who are prepared to take that bold action to ensure that better future for our country”, begging the question why in 14 years of power it hadn’t occurred to them to start until now.

Sunak was unable to boast of any record or even promise a policy on controlling legal migration, which makes up the vast majority of arrivals and is in an era of historic, all-time highs after the Tories threw the borders wide open, but he sought a point of differentiation on illegal migration. The Prime Minister cited the government’s Rwanda plan, under which a number of boat migrant arrivals to the United Kingdom would be sent to East Africa to live at taxpayer’s expense.

He said: “Just look at our plan to cut migration and stop the boats with our Rwanda scheme. Across Europe the penny is dropping, that ours is right approach. But if Labour become the next government they’ll scrap the Rwanda scheme, and enact a de facto amnesty for asylum seekers, making us a magnet for every illegal immigrant in Europe. In every way, Labour would make our country less secure.”

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