Welcome to the Centre for European Reform podcast, Unpacking Europe.

I'm John Springford, an associate fellow at the CER.

And joining me today is Madeline Sumption, who is Director of the Migration

Observatory at Oxford University and Deputy Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee,

which is a body that advises the government on migration policy. And today we're going to talk about the British government's white paper on immigration,

which proposes some more reforms to a migration regime that has been going through a lot of

change over the last few years. This was the white paper that led to a bit of a political storm

over the Prime Minister's Island of Strangers'

speech, which we are going to entirely sidestep, or largely sidestep, because we're here

to deal with the policy implications. Before we start, I'll just give a very quick background on the

context. So there was the end of free movement at the end of 2021 and Boris Johnson then prime minister put a relatively

liberal visa regime in its place after that regime was instituted we had a very big rise in net

migration and it soared to 900,000 in mid-20203 before before falling back to about half that level by the end of 2024.

The cause of that big rise in net migration is debated, but it's clearly some combination of

lots of labor demand and a weak employment recovery among domestic workers after COVID.

Relatively low salary and skills thresholds

that's the relatively liberal visa regime instituted. So there was an end of free movement

which meant that net migration from the EU fell, but because of that big surge in demand,

they encouraged employers to recruit from outside Europe to satisfy it.

And then, of course, there were some big one-off changes. There was a big rise in refugees

from Ukraine and Hong Kong. And there was also a big rise in overseas students after they

couldn't come during lockdown. So that's kind of the context. And obviously, that huge rise

...