NET migration was cut by a tenth last year — but still stood at 685,000.
Officials figures for 2023 came out yesterday amid a General Election row over control of Britain’s borders.
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Rishi Sunak trumpeted his recent crackdown on visas and the Rwanda plan as solutions to stop arrivals.
Yet the Home Office stressed the figures — including legal and illegal arrivals — were recorded before the visas crackdown kicked in.
And Oxford University’s Migration Observatory said it was “unusually high”.
The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, marked a ten per cent drop from the 2022 record of 764,000. Yet it was still three times higher than 2019, when Boris Johnson promised to cut it from 250,000.
Mr Sunak may come under further attack today as Channel crossings are set to pass 10,000 for the year.
Yesterday he insisted that flights to Rwanda will take off only if the Tories win the election.
He said: “There is no way to stop this problem unless you can have a deterrent, unless it’s clear that if someone comes to our country illegally they will be removed.”
Labour’s Yvette Cooper blasted: “This General Election is a choice — more chaos with the Conservatives, or a Labour government that can fix the chaos and get a grip on the immigration and asylum system again.”
