Quarterly and annual statistics relating to information on border control and visas, asylum, managed migration, and enforcement and compliance. A new format for these statistics was introduced from second quarter 2011. See separate entry under immigration statistics at: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/immigration-statistics.

This release replaces the previous annual and quarterly publications Control of Immigration Statistics and the annual British Citizenship, following a public consultation. Each topic now has its own entry, links to these related reports can be found under the "additional links" section. There are a number of different measures that can be used to monitor numbers of people coming to the United Kingdom for study.

For those students who are subject to immigration control, administrative information is available on student visas and visa extensions, as well as records of students admitted. The International Passenger Survey (IPS), run by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), provides estimates of all students arriving in the UK, with the ONS migration statistics focussing on those who intend to stay for a year or more. Research into students has also been published, for example Migrant Journey Analysis that involved linking records to give a more complete picture as to what happened to a group of students over a five year period.

These various statistics and research can appear to give different pictures of student immigration. Often this is because the latest data for different measures cover different time periods. In addition, they also count different aspects of the immigration process, with some showing intentions or permissions, whilst others show actual events.

Nationality of migrants. containing estimates of Long-Term International Migration, International Passenger survey and pre 1975 archived data. annual table.

Number of migrants by decade of arrival to the United Kingdom. Includes all decades since 1970. Data shown for years 2004 to 2016.

Numbers are rounded to nearest thousand.

Figures are based on surveys and 95% confidence intervals are provided.

Special Licence Access data to the Annual Population Survey. Approved ONS Researchers only.

Data exploring the overview of migrants in the UK labour market by region.

The UK's decision to leave the EU has necessitated a wholesale rethink of UK immigration policy with the ending of free movement of workers. The motivations for this work then were to examine the immigration/worker protection boundary from a number of perspectives, with particular emphasis on the legal dimension. While understanding the developing EU and domestic (macro) perspective our aims at a micro level were to understand the legal problems EU citizens in low paid work in the UK were facing and how they resolve those problems. These legal problems were at times exacerbated by Brexit, particularly with the advent of the new digital EUSS (EU Settlement Scheme)- our research followed this in real time and recorded issues. One of our key findings and covered by the book published as a result of the dataset here is that of Pragmatic Law and the role of everyday community advice in the wider legal advice eco-system. This is an element of legal advice which to date had been little researched. Another key outcome was the contribution to literature on both EU free movement and citizenship studies, particularly in the context of vulnerable EU citizens.

Database on research participants in the BRAD project. The Personal Data have been removed in order to make the identification of the research participants impossible. For Polish migrants in the UK, the database contains the information about the application to European Union Settlement Scheme.

This dataset is an analysis of the long-term migrant population of England and Wales by country of birth, passports held and other characteristics based on Census 2021.

Usual resident

A usual resident is anyone who on Census Day, 21 March 2021 was in the UK and had stayed or intended to stay in the UK for a period of 12 months or more, or had a permanent UK address and was outside the UK and intended to be outside the UK for less than 12 months.

Country of birth

The country in which a person was born. The following country of birth classifications are used in this dataset:

• Country of birth 12a: Political groupings of countries by EU membership and geographical location for non-EU countries.
• Country of birth 190a: Individual countries. This classification includes geographical groupings for low volume countries.
• Country of birth (3 categories): These categories have been derived from country of birth 12a and include all UK countries in "Europe: United Kingdom", all EU countries in "Europe: EU countries" and all remaining countries including British Overseas territories in "Non-EU countries (including British Overseas)".

Country of birth classifications

Passports held

The country or countries that a person holds, or is entitled to hold, a passport for. Where a person recorded having more than one passport, they were counted only once, categorised in the following priority order: 1. UK passport, 2. Irish passport, 3. Other passport.

The following classifications were created for this dataset for comparability with other international migration releases:

• Passports held (4 categories): High level political groupings of passport held by EU membership and geographical location for non-EU countries.
• Passports held (12 categories): Political groupings of passport held by EU membership and geographical location for non-EU countries.
• Passports held (150 categories): Individual countries for passport held. This classification includes geographical groupings for low volume countries.

Alternate passports held classifications

Economic activity status

The economic activity status of a person on Census Day, 21 March 2021. The following classification was created for this dataset:

• Economic activity status (6 categories): These categories have been derived from the base classification to create employed, self-employed, unemployed (seeking work), economically inactive students and economically active other groups.

Students who are economically active are included in either the Employee, Self-employed, or Unemployed (Looking for work) category

Economic activity status classifications

Industry

The industry worked in for those in current employment. The following classification was used for this dataset:

• Industry (current) classification 22a

Industry classifications

Introduction

The 2023 mid-year estimate (MYE) is the current official estimate of the population for local authorities in England and Wales. Estimates are produced annually by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the 2023 MYE was published on 15 July 2024.

Comparison to previous MYE data

The previous MYE series (for the period 2012-2020) starts with the 2011 census estimate. Each subsequent year’s population is calculated by adding estimates of births, deaths and migration to the previous year’s population. The 2021 MYE represents a break in this series as it uses the 2021 census as its base.

The ONS revised the 2012-2020 MYE series to bring it in line with the 2021 MYE, so that comparisons could be made between between this series and the previous series. The values plotted on the chart are the revised values of the previously published estimates for 2011 to 2022, together with the estimates for 2023.

Key Points

• London’s mid-2023 population was 8.945 million
• London’s population increased by 76,300 persons compared to the previous mid-year value
• Components of change were as follows:
• 105,100 births and 53,500 deaths (natural change of 51,600)
• Net domestic migration was an outflow of 129,200
• Net international migration was an inflow of 154,100

Population Change

London’s 2023 population was 8,945,310. The first chart below shows the 2023 MYE in the context of previous estimates. There is an uptick after a temporary decrease in population which we attribute to the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://cdn.datapress.cloud/london/img/dataset/763802e7-af17-4b77-995d-44c494fb68af/2025-06-09T20%3A56%3A29/666cd938678c5361c953cb608e532416.webp" width="1152" alt="Embedded Image" />

Components of Change

Births, deaths and migration form the components of population change.

The 2023 MYE value for births was 4% lower than that in 2022, and for deaths 3% higher. The consequent value for natural change (births - deaths) was 10% lower than in 2022.

At -129,000, the value for domestic migration (migration within the UK) was nearly 3% higher than the 2022 value, so still significantly lower than the peak net outflow during the COVID-19 pandemic of -186,000. An outflow of domestic migrants from London is normal and this has been the case each year for the last two decades. This flow is partly because many international in-migrants initially settle in London before moving out to other parts of the UK. The second move in this sequence is counted as a domestic migration.

There has been a marked change in immigration since 2021. This can be attributed to the end of free movement for EU nationals, easing of travel restrictions following the COVID 19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. At over 150,000, the 2023 MYE value for London’s net international migration was more than 18% higher than 2022, and represents a considerable increase from 78,000 in 2021.

https://cdn.datapress.cloud/london/img/dataset/763802e7-af17-4b77-995d-44c494fb68af/2025-06-09T20%3A56%3A29/cb537d44954e11f7f7b7e2189ae74629.webp" width="1152" alt="Embedded Image" />

Age structure of the population

https://cdn.datapress.cloud/london/img/dataset/763802e7-af17-4b77-995d-44c494fb68af/2025-06-09T20%3A56%3A29/6d4cf55b96888dbc3aacfc1de5c664ec.webp" width="1152" alt="Embedded Image" />

Future Updates

The release of the next mid-year estimates is expected in July 2025.

The full ONS mid-year population estimates release and back series can be found on the ONS website: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates.

For information relating to London’s population see the demography pages of the London Datastore: https://data.london.gov.uk/demography/ or email demography@london.gov.uk.

An in-depth review of the available evidence for population change in London since the start of the coronavirus pandemic has been produced by GLA Demography: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/population-change-in-london-during-the-pandemic.

The projected number of internal migrants and international and cross border migrants moving into and out of the area between 2005 and 2029 Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS) Publisher: Office for National Statistics (ONS) Geographies: Local Authority District (LAD), County/Unitary Authority, Government Office Region (GOR), National, Strategic Health Authority (SHA) Geographic coverage: England Time coverage: 2005-2029 Type of data: Modelled data

This research examines the ways in which recent East European migration to the UK has been racialised. 48 in-depth face-to-face interviews were carried out with 25 individual Hungarian (among the first of 'A8' migrants to the UK) and 23 individual Romanian (among the second wave of 'A2' migrants to the UK) migrants in Bristol. Focus groups were also conducted with groups of Hungarian migrants (5 groups) and Romanian migrants (5 groups). These were done to understand the main differences in the racialisation of A8 and A2 migration, to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the migrants' experiences of exclusion and marginalisation, and to question the usefulness of the 'colour paradigm' for understanding and investigating racial phenomena. A self-completion follow-up questionnaire was used to also gain demographic data.

A research report which presents an improved method for estimating short-term immigration to local authorities (LAs) within England and Wales as well as experimental short-term migration inflow estimates for each local authority.

Source agency: Office for National Statistics

Designation: Experimental Official Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: STIM

Flag 4 records indicate international in-migrants who register with an NHS GP. This dataset indicates, for each local authority in England and Wales, the number of new Flag 4 records added to the Patient Register during the mid-year to mid-year period.

Source agency: Office for National Statistics

Designation: Official Statistics not designated as National Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: Flag 4

Description

The MIGR-TWIT Corpus is a multilingual corpus of tweets about the topic of migration in Europe. Within the framework of the collaborative research project OLiNDiNUM (Observatoire LINguistique du DIscours NUMérique, Linguistic Observatory of Online Debate) the MIGR-TWIT Corpus is created with the aim of developing language databases of online debate. Considering the global issue of migration in line with British and French political contexts of last dozen years from 2011 to 2022, the corpus consists of two sub-corpora:

• FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus for French language data (1 January 2011 - 30 June 2022) and

• UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022 Corpus for English language data (1 January 2012 - 5 September 2022)

Using the Twitter API v2 Academic Research, tweets containing at least one occurrence of migration or refugee related words are retrieved automatically from 28 right and far-right political figures and parties. The whole corpus contains 18,233 tweets and 533,198 words.

Scientific reference:

Pietrandrea, P., Battaglia, E. (2022). “Migrants and the EU”. The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 192, 139-157.

Blandino, G. (2023). 10 years of public debate on immigration: combining topic modeling and corpus linguistics to examine the British (far-)right discourse on Twitter, MA University of Wolverhampton

Jeon, S. (2025). Le discours numérique sur l'immigration en France entre 2011 et 2022. Une analyse de corpus (Online Discourse on Immigration in France between 2011 and 2022. A Corpus Analysis), PhD Thesis, Université de Lille, France.

Contents

The whole corpus contains two CSV Zip files (tabular format) corresponding to each sub-corpus. The complete corpus is presented in two versions, one version with the tweet identifier (data_id) and the text of the tweet (data_text) as a header (folders named FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_textonly and UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022_textonly, respectively composed of 12 and 11 Zip files of every single year), and the other version with all tweet fields information included as a header, such as the posting date (data_created_at), the username (author_name), the number of retweets (data_public_metrics_retweet_count), etc., with two folders named FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_meta and UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022_meta. Detailed information for each sub-corpus is illustrated below.

1. FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022

• Created at: 2022-08-08

• Language: FR

• Coverage: 16 user accounts; 11,761 tweets; 358,491 words

• Time of data collection: start=2011-01-01; end=2022-06-30

• Keywords: words derived from a latin root “migr” of migrare

• Corpus composition:

• Political figures and parties of table above are listed in chronological order according to the dates on which they posted their first tweet.

• *Before the launching of Twitter API v2 Academic Research, migr-tweets were collected from the database of Europresse.com including 1,453 tweets of Jean Messiha as part of the reference study (Pietrandrea & Battaglia 2022). However, the Twitter account in question has been permanently banned since July 2021. For our data collection using the Twitter API started in September 2021, we could not access this account. Therefore, we decided not to include his tweets in the FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 for the sake of consistency with the rest of twitter data that are automatically retrieved.

• The sub-corpus FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2017-2022 is developed, annotated and analyzed as part of a doctoral thesis in progress (Jeon, 2025) with the aim of studying the semantic construction of migr-lexicon over the period between 2011 and 2022.

2. UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022

• Created at: 2022-09-06

• Language: EN

• Coverage: 12 user accounts; 6,472 tweets; 174,707 words

• Time of data collection: start=2012-01-01; end=2022-09-05

• Keywords: words derived from a latin root “migr” of migrare in addition to the keywords “refugee(s)” and “asylum”.

• Corpus composition:

• 2 out of 12 accounts are official accounts belonging to the” UK Home Office” department and the “UKIP” (United Kingdom Independence Party) party. 10 out of 12 accounts are political figures’ accounts.

• The corpus UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2012-2022 will be exploited for the following master’s thesis: Blandino, G. (2023). 10 years of public debate on immigration: combining topic modeling and corpus linguistics to examine the British (far-)right discourse on Twitter, MA University of Wolverhampton.

The MIFARE survey was designed to focus on immigrants who migrated to the receiving country at an age of 16 years or older. The MIFARE survey has been conducted in three countries: Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. All three countries have the opportunity to sample from population registers, including migrants. The opportunity to sample randomly from the registers enables us to test for representativeness of the survey, to approach migrant groups that are smaller in number, and guarantees comparable designs in the three countries. We propose to sample migrants from the age of 18 and older, and a native control group (to be able to compare between migrants and natives also for the questions specifically developed for the proposed survey). We choose 4 intra-EU origin countries and 6 extra-EU origin countries, including the most numerous migrant populations: Poland, Romania, Spain and the UK for the intra-EU origin countries. As extra-EU origin countries, we select China (mainland only, excluding Hong Kong), Japan, Turkey, the Philippines (not in Germany due to sampling issues), Russia, and the US. China and Turkey are the only countries not included in either the ISSP or ESS.

Nombre de migrants par décennie d’arrivée au Royaume-Uni. Comprend toutes les décennies depuis 1970. Données présentées pour les années 2004 à 2016. Les nombres sont arrondis au millier le plus proche. Les chiffres sont basés sur des enquêtes et des intervalles de confiance de 95 % sont fournis. Données sur l’accès aux permis spéciaux à l’Enquête annuelle sur la population. Les chercheurs approuvés de l’ONS seulement.

This table contains 25 series, with data for years 1955 - 2013 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 items: Canada ...) Last permanent residence (25 items: Total immigrants; France; Great Britain; Total Europe ...).

This table contains 32 series, with data for years 1956 - 1976 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years), and was last released on 2012-02-16. This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Unit of measure (1 items: Persons ...) Geography (32 items: Outside Canada; Great Britain; France; Europe ...).

In 2015 a team of researchers based in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Malta undertook interviews with refugees and migrants as well as stakeholders and observed events of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ as they unfolded.

The dataset deposited here includes information on semi-structured interviews with a total of 500 refugees and migrants, 440 of whom had crossed the Mediterranean by boat in 2015 to Greece (215 interviews), Italy (205 interviews) and Malta (20 interviews) together with a further 60 respondents who had moved to Turkey and were considering making the onward journey to Europe. These countries reflected the key locations of the crisis.

The initial analysis of the dataset has meant that it has been coded to record who was on the move, the journeys that they made and the routes that they took. This enables an examination of the relationship between micro-level characteristics and the geographies of migration that were recorded.

Specifically the dataset here includes:

1. Methodological note - a description of the project, the approach to the fieldwork and the analysis undertaken

2. Individuals - data on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the interviewees.

3. Routes - data on the routes taken by our interviewees and the duration taken to travel along them.

4. Journeys - data setting out the individual stops and journeys recorded from each interviewee, travel method between them and duration of travel. This has been prepared for insertion into GIS Mapping software.

   In the first six months of 2015 more than 100,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean, arriving at the shores of southern Europe in search of protection or a better life. In the same period more than 1,800 people lost their lives, drowning as overloaded and often unseaworthy boats sank into the sea. Although the crisis is in many ways nothing new, these scenes have captured the public and media imagination and have challenged the ability of European States to respond appropriately. Recent months have seen increasingly heated discussions at the national and EU level about whether rescues at sea are a vital humanitarian intervention or simply encourage others to attempt the crossing, and whether those who arrive can be dealt with through mandatory or voluntary relocation quotas. Many of these discussions are underpinned by assumptions about why it is that migrants make the journey to Europe in the first place.

In this context the research aims to better understand the dynamics of migration in the Mediterranean region by providing the first large-scale, systematic and comparative study of the backgrounds, experiences, aspirations and routes of migrants in four European countries (Italy, Greece, Malta and Turkey) gathered from 550 migrants who have recently arrived and 100 stakeholders. The research pushes the theoretical and conceptual boundaries of migration studies, encouraging critical reflexive dialogue and practice by opening new and inclusive spaces for questioning and challenging established ways of categorising and thinking about with the Mediterranean migration crisis. In so doing it will create opportunities for increased policy dialogue and academic collaboration between the case study countries - and across the EU more generally - around the evidence gathered.

The research is underpinned by a number of urgent research questions which inform the collection and analysis of the data: 1. What are the underlying factors shaping migration from countries of origin and how do the characteristics and backgrounds of migrants shape the response to structural issues? 2. What are the opportunity structures that shape, inform or constrain migrant journeys to Europe? 3. What are the differences between the Central Mediterranean (principally from Libya to Italy and Malta) and Eastern (Turkey to Greece) Mediterranean routes? 4. To what extent are migrant journeys to Europe, or particular countries within Europe, shaped or even determined by non-state actors (agents, facilitators and civil society)? 5. What are the impacts of policies intended to deter or prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean?

The research will be delivered by a team of leading UK migration scholars from the Universities of Coventry, Oxford, Birmingham and Sussex working in collaboration with academic partners in the case study countries and supported by experts from international, governmental and non-governmental organisations. The team has established relationships with local civil society organisations that will facilitate access to research participants and provide advice and information on policy or other developments which could impact on the delivery of the project.

The research will benefit a wide range of academic, governmental, international and civil society organisations and inform the development of strategic, political and policy responses to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean. This impact will be secured through...