EXCLUSIVE How much is immigration going to transform YOUR area in the next two decades? Search tool reveals the astonishing population projections of every council
That is, for context, enough people to fill Norwich or Reading.
Government data laying bare how mass migration is going to transform Britain shows that in Birmingham alone, another 543,000 foreign nationals are expected to call the city home by 2047.
This figure is the equivalent to 47 per cent of the local authority's current population, thought to be around 1.15million.
But looking at the immigration statistics this way excludes hundreds of thousands of residents who will emigrate between now and then. Doing so also fails to factor into account internal migration, births and deaths.
This makes it impossible to predict exactly how many residents will be immigrants in all of England's 330-plus local authorities.
The population projections, published by the Office for National Statistics this week, gave a stark glimpse of the future.
Nationwide, England's population is set to increase from 57m to 64m by 2047.
But the overall numbers laid bare sharp differences in fortunes between local areas.
According to the ONS projections, South Derbyshire will grow by 38 per cent over the time period to accommodate 153,000 people.
No other council, with the exception of the City of London, is expected to undergo a bigger expansion in terms of percentage growth.
In contrast, Gosport's population is projected to fall by 4 per cent to 79,000, mainly because of deaths outstripping births. This is the largest decline in the country.
In terms of raw figures, Birmingham is set to see the greatest number of immigrants (542,957), followed by Manchester (462,486) and Newham (456,342) between 2022 and 2047.
But when compared against current populations, Westminster tops the table – when excluding City of London.
In that London borough, almost 50,000 immigrants are set to arrive in the next two decades.
By comparison, only 11,500 people live there at present.
All but seven authorities will see a net increase in international migration – defined as more people from overseas arriving than leaving.
The councils which buck the trend are Fylde, South Hams, Isles of Scilly, Ribble Valley, North Kesteven, Amber Valley and Rutland.
One of the country's most esteemed voices on immigration believes the public has had enough over the past few years.
Professor David Coleman, emeritus professor of demography at the University of Oxford and co-founder of pressure group of Migration Watch, said: 'Some focused immigration, preferably without dependents is desirable.
'But it is well known that immigration cannot "solve" population ageing, only moderate it. Otherwise more and more migrants are needed, leading to astronomical population growth.
'But it is absurd to speak of more immigration after the huge recent inflows. Surely the public will not endure it?
'We have nothing to show by way of prosperity from the very large number of immigrants in recent years.'
Alp Mehmet, of Migration Watch UK, said: 'Immigration is now the sole driver of unprecedented of population growth.
'The pace of demographic change is ever more rapid while the reshaping of our society as deaths exceed births will soon be irreversible.
'The solution is not more immigration, which has for decades been a net cost to the exchequer. All that will do is add to our future problems. Much better to create conditions that encourage families to grow.'
As well as high levels of immigration, England's changing demographics are set to be supercharged by falling birthrates in the UK.
Deaths are set to outnumber births in two-thirds of all authorities, the ONS estimates also show.
Demographers claim the free falling figures mean we may need to become reliant on immigration to prop up our economy and avoid the threat of 'underpopulation'.
Otherwise, the nation could be left with too few younger people to work, pay tax and look after the elderly.
Keir Starmer unveiled a crackdown on immigration last month, warning that failure to control the system risked turning Britain into an 'island of strangers'.
Downing Street was forced to deny angry comparisons from MPs that it was an echo of Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech.
Scrambling to blunt the threat of Reform, Sir Keir vowed to give Brits what they had 'asked for time and time again' as he announced a package to 'take back control of our borders'.
Under Number 10's long-awaited blueprint to curb immigration, skills thresholds will be hiked and rules on fluency in English toughened. Migrants will also be required to wait 10 years for citizenship rather than the current five and face deportation for even lower-level crimes.
Policymakers estimate the government's package will bring down annual inflows by around 100,000.
Methodology
The projections were produced by the ONS for the sake of informing policy and planning, using past trends to inform how populations might change in the future.
But it comes with caveats and warnings, including a section which explains that the demographic behaviour used to develop assumptions for projections is 'inherently uncertain'.
It, therefore, warns that the projections become increasingly unreliable the further they are carried forward, particularly for smaller geographical areas and detailed age and sex breakdowns.
At the local level, population change is influenced by economic development and housing policies, factors not included in these projections.
It also warns that there is already a margin of error in the underlying input data used in the projections, for example, estimates of the current population and past migration flows.
In addition, the ONS states that its assumptions about the future cannot be certain, as patterns of births, deaths, and migration are always liable to change and can be influenced by many factors.
In a blog accompanying the release, head of population and household projections James Robards stressed that the projections 'don't take into account potential future policy changes'.
He also highlighted that 'drivers behind the projected population increase vary significantly by area'.
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The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ice ‘politically targeted' farm worker activist Juarez Zeferino, colleagues say
Farm worker activist Alfredo 'Lelo' Juarez Zeferino, 25, was driving his partner to her job on a tulip farm north of Seattle one March morning when they were pulled over by an unmarked car. A plainclothes agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) emerged and shattered Juarez Zeferino's front window before handcuffing him, his partner said. The officer drove Juarez Zeferino to a nondescript warehouse – the same one he and other activists had years ago discovered is an unmarked Ice holding facility. After his 25 March detention, dozens gathered outside to demand his release. Instead, he was transferred to the Northwest Ice Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, where he has been held ever since. Officially, Juarez Zeferino's arrest was based on a deportation order. But the activist's detention comes as the Trump administration has launched an aggressive crackdown against its perceived political enemies, including both immigrants and labor organizers. 'We believe, no question, that he was a target,' said Rosalinda Guillen, veteran farm worker organizer and founder of Community to Community Development, where Juarez Zeferino volunteered. The young organizer has played an instrumental role in securing protections for Washington farm workers, including strengthened statewide heat protections for outdoor laborers mandating water breaks when temperatures top 80F, enshrined in 2023. In 2021, he and other activists also won a law guaranteeing farm workers overtime pay. And in 2019, advocacy from Juarez Zeferino and other campaigners about exploitation in the H-2A guest worker program prompted Washington to create the nation's first-ever oversight committee for foreign workers. 'He's a very humble person, very quiet but yet very determined and willing to go to whatever extent to get victory for his people,' said Edgar Franks, political director of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farm worker union which Juarez Zeferino helped found. His successful track record has earned him renown in labor and immigrant justice circles across the country. Franks believes it also made him a 'political target' for Trump. 'We just have to look at the record of everybody that has been targeted by the Trump administration, from the students at Columbia to [the detention of immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra] in Colorado,' he said. 'There's already a track of people that have been targeted to silence them and to make sure that the people that look up to them get silenced.' Reached for comment, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said that allegations of Ice politically targeting Juarez Zeferino were 'categorically FALSE', calling him 'an illegal alien from Mexico with a final order of removal from a judge'. 'The only thing that makes someone a target of Ice is if they are in the United States illegally,' she said. She said the activist, whom she called 'Juan Juarez-Ceferino,' refused to comply with Ice during his arrest, and that officers used the 'minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation' and protect themselves. In court, a DHS attorney also said Juarez Zeferino was noncompliant during his arrest, and claimed he was a flight risk because he had previously missed a court hearing. His lawyer Larkin VanDerhoef denied that his client was a flight risk, saying he was unaware of his missed court date. In court, he noted that Juarez Zeferino had received dozens of letters, demonstrating that he is a 'positive force'. He said Juarez Zeferino complied with the officers who arrested him. 'Lelo had opened his window to talk to officers and was asking to see their warrant for his arrest when they smashed his window,' he said, adding that a group of officers from not only Ice, but also border patrol, homeland security investigations, and the Drug Enforcement Administration worked together to arrest him. Juarez Zeferino's detention has sparked concern among other immigrant workers fighting for better labor conditions, and since his arrest, others have also been detained. In April armed Customs and Border Protection agents raided a Vermont dairy farm and arrested eight immigrant laborers who were involved with a labor rights campaign. Last month, Ice also arrested farm worker leaders in New York. 'This is a good strategy to squelch union organizing as well as farm worker advocacy, but it is horrifying to us that some of the people who make the lowest salaries in our country are being deported even as they provide the necessary workforce to keep our country fed,' said Julie Taylor, executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, a faith-based organization which supports farm worker organizing. Juarez Zeferino was arrested on the grounds of a 2018 deportation order. It stemmed from a 2015 traffic stop by Bellingham, Washington, police officers who then turned him over to Ice. After the stop, Juarez Zeferino – then a minor – was detained for less than 24 hours. He later sued Bellingham and its police department saying that his arrest was the result of racial profiling; the city settled for $100,000. The farm worker activist's friends and legal counsel said he was unaware of the deportation order, which was mailed to an address Juarez Zeferino provided but then bounced back to the government. 'He wasn't in hiding,' said Franks. 'He was out in the open, doing media and serving on city commissions.' His lawyer VanDerhoef successfully had the order reopened in April this year – just one day before Juarez Zeferino was due to be placed on a deportation flight. But in May, an immigration court judge ruled that she had no jurisdiction to grant bond to Juarez Zeferino – a decision VanDerhoef quickly appealed. VanDerhoef said the judge's ruling was based on an unusual legal interpretation by Tacoma judges, who routinely argue that they lack jurisdiction to issue bonds to immigrants who entered the country without a visa. He signed his client on to a class-action lawsuit focused on the issue. He also filed a motion to terminate the case against his client. In June, a court denied the motion, so the next step will probably be to apply for asylum in the US. 'We're basically weighing what other options he has, what he can apply for,' VanDerhoef said. Aaron Korthuis, an attorney at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, who is representing Juarez Zeferino in the class-action lawsuit, said he did not doubt the activist was a political target. 'A lot of what this administration is doing is attempting to send a message through its arrests [and] through its removals,' he said. 'It shouldn't shock anyone that who they are targeting for arrest is part and parcel of the larger effort to intimidate, exact retribution, and send a message.' VanDerhoef declined to comment on whether or not his client's arrest was politically motivated, but said it was unsurprising that it had sparked concern about Trump's immigration policies among other farm workers. 'The last thing I want to do is cause any more fear or panic that is already high among immigrant communities,' he said. 'But I do think this administration has shown that nothing is off the table when it comes to who they will target and also the tactics they use.' Experts say the Trump administration has violated court norms and ignored court orders in its attacks on immigrants. The president has also made life harder for immigration attorneys, including in a memorandum claiming they engage in 'unscrupulous behavior'. And the sheer number of Ice raids conducted under his administration also makes it harder for such lawyers to do their jobs, said VanDerhoef. In the north-east US, Ice arrests have increased so much that officials are 'running into space issues', said VanDerhoef. The immigration prison where Juarez Zeferino is being held has so far exceeded its capacity that some people have been transferred without warning to facilities in Los Angeles and Alaska. The overcrowding also creates challenges when it comes to representation, VanDerhoef said. These days, visitation rooms are often so overbooked that he and other attorneys are facing 'half a day waits' to meet with their clients. He worries that attorneys cannot keep up with the increase in Ice arrests. 'There are not significantly more lawyers doing this work even though there are significantly more people being detained,' he said. Guillen, the veteran farm worker organizer, first met Juarez Zeferino in 2013, when he he was a 13-year-old who had recently arrived in the US from Mexico. He was so small that he looked more like he was 11, she said, but he was 'a hard worker' and 'fierce'. That year, Juarez Zeferino and about 200 workers on a Washington berry farm walked off the job demanding better working conditions and pay. Over the next four years, they organized work stoppages and boycotts, with Juarez Zeferino – who speaks English, Spanish and his native Mixteco – often serving as a spokesperson. In 2017, the workers were granted a union election, resulting in the formation of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farm worker union representing hundreds of Indigenous farm workers. It's a 'nightmare' organization for Trump, who doesn't want to see immigrant laborers organized, said Guillen. 'These are communities that normally are marginalized, fighting for their rights and winning,' she said. The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know. If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods. Secure Messaging in the Guardian app The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said. If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select 'Secure Messaging'. SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post See our guide at for alternative methods and the pros and cons of each. Since Juarez Zeferino's arrest, calls for his freedom have met with an outpouring of support, Guillen said. 'All the legislators know him, and there was immediate support for him in letters and calls,' she said. But she wishes Democrats would do more to fight for workers like him, including by trying to stop Ice arrests within Washington. 'Democrats need to be bolder,' she said. Franks agreed, and said workers like Juarez Zeferino should obtain amnesty from Ice. 'Just a couple years ago we were essential workers and the heroes but now we're the terrorists and the criminals,' he said. Asked if she had visited Juarez Zeferino, Guillen said, 'I can't do it.' She worries about his health and wellbeing in the facility. Franks, too, said he was concerned that the 'already skinny' Juarez Zeferino will become malnourished while in detention. But when he has visited the young activist, he said he was 'trying to keep his spirits up'. 'He's still messing around and joking around,' he said. 'And he's like, 'when I get out, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.'' Asked what is on that to-do list, Franks said Juarez Zeferino wants to be reunited with his family. 'And he wants to get back to the struggle,' he said.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Children in England ‘living in almost Dickensian levels of poverty'
Children in England are living in 'almost Dickensian levels of poverty' where deprivation has become normalised, the children's commissioner has said, as she insisted the two-child benefit limit must be scrapped. Young people said they had experienced not having enough water to shower, rats biting through their walls, and mouldy bedrooms, among a number of examples in a report on the 'crisis of hardship' gripping the country. Dame Rachel de Souza said she had noticed a significant shift in how young people talked about their lives since she became children's commissioner four years ago, and that 'issues that were traditionally seen as 'adult' concerns are now keenly felt by children'. 'Children shared harrowing accounts of hardship, with some in almost Dickensian levels of poverty,' she said. 'They don't talk about 'poverty' as an abstract concept but about not having the things that most people would consider basic: a safe home that isn't mouldy or full or rats, with a bed big enough to stretch out in, 'luxury' food like bacon, a place to do homework, heating, privacy in the bathroom and being able to wash, having their friends over, and not having to travel hours to school.' The report said it was 'deeply concerning how often children seemed to accept these inadequate situations as normal, or to have worryingly low expectations for what they should be entitled to'. She said that, in 'one of the richest societies in the world', people in power 'should be ashamed that children are growing up knowing their futures are being determined by their financial circumstances'. A record 4.5 million children were living in poverty in the UK in the year to April 2024, according to the latest figures. Labour's flagship child poverty strategy has been delayed until at least the autumn, as it faces growing pressure to end the two-child limit on universal credit. On Sunday, the education minister said the government's recent U-turn on changes to welfare would make it harder to implement the policy, adding to concerns it may not be added to the strategy. 'The decisions that have been taken in the last week do make decisions, future decisions harder,' Bridget Phillipson told BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. The limit, which came into effect under the Conservatives in April 2017, restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates 109 children are pulled into poverty every day by the limit. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that axing the policy would cost the government about £3.4bn a year and would lift 500,000 children out of relative poverty. De Souza said there was 'no quick fix to ending child poverty', but it was 'very clear that any child poverty strategy must be built on the foundation of scrapping the two-child limit'. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion The commissioner's report, based on the experiences of 128 children aged between six and 18 across the country between January and March this year, noted a range of concerns including lack of access to quality, healthy food, and living in cramped and poor conditions. De Souza also called for a 'triple-lock' on child-related benefits to ensure they kept up with rising prices, reforms to ensure families are not housed in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation for longer than the legal six-week limit and free bus travel for all school-age children in England. Responding to the report, Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the school leaders' union NAHT, said teachers were 'increasingly running food banks and warm hubs, providing food vouchers and even offering use of laundry facilities, but this shouldn't be necessary, and schools cannot tackle all the underlying causes of child poverty'. He said he supported the commissioner's call for cross-departmental action and auto-enrolment for free meals. The Department for Work and Pensions has been contacted for comment.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Germany is ‘importing' antisemitism, our leaders claim. Irony is not their strong point
It could have been a Mitchell and Webb sketch – a man with a very German accent and a distinguished Nazi grandfather complaining: 'These foreigners, coming over here, importing their antisemitism.' Only this was not a comedy. The man was Germany's chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and he was making his complaint last month in an interview with Fox news in the US, attributing rising antisemitism in Germany to 'the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years'. How did Merz manage to miss the joke – apart from by being German of course? The chancellor is not the only German politician to have made the dubious connection between foreigners and antisemitism. Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy premier of Bavaria, made headlines in 2023 when an antisemitic leaflet he was alleged to have written at school – better known as the Auschwitz pamphlet – came to light. Aiwanger denied writing the leaflet. Then his brother joined the fray, claiming authorship, and hardly anybody mentioned it again. However, it didn't stop Aiwanger from declaring later that year: 'We have imported antisemitism to Germany.' How did 'imported antisemitism', a far-right anti-immigrant buzz phrase, make it into the political mainstream? After all, Germans didn't exactly need to import antisemitism. But this is the way we see it in Germany: if you haven't committed genocide you can't properly claim to be against it. I'm not making this up. You couldn't make it up. Indeed, the political scientist Esra Özyürek discusses the belief in her excellent 2023 book Subcontractors of Guilt. The thinking behind it is that because of our history, we teach the next generation to make sure it will never happen again. At school we studied the Holocaust every year. We didn't learn to analyse antisemitism, but we learned to be very wary of it – or as the writer Max Czollek put it: 'Today Germans know mainly one thing about Jews: that they killed them.' Immigrants to Germany need to know a bit more than that if they want to become German citizens. They need to know when the state of Israel was founded, and who is allowed to become a member of one of the 40 Maccabi sports clubs. If you're not born in Germany you have to prove you're not antisemitic by learning facts about Jewish people. But even if you were born here, like me, the statistics still refer to you as an immigrant if one of your parents comes from a different country. And as such, you are viewed with suspicion when it comes to the antisemitism you may have 'imported'. During the last election, Merz suggested revoking German citizenship from dual nationals if they committed a crime. When asked if that meant, for example, getting on a bus without a ticket, he made it clear it related to antisemitism. However, antisemitism is not a criminal offence in German law, so we see it everywhere. Jews have been arrested for holding up signs reading 'Jews against genocide'. An Irish protester was arrested in Berlin for speaking Irish at a demonstration for Palestine because the authorities did not have an Irish translator present to check if they were 'importing antisemitism' too. This has gone so far that the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner has reprimanded Germany for criminalising protest against the war in Gaza – including curtailing the use of Arabic at protests. In the end Merz didn't get his way, but he drove the message home: Germans like me with foreign heritage are Germans on trial. In 2024 the German parliament adopted a controversial Never Again is Now resolution to fight antisemitism. One of the examples cited was the 'Berlinale scandal'. When No Other Land won the documentary award at the Berlin film festival, the Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham called for an end to apartheid and his Palestinian co-director, Basel Adra, added that he found it very hard to celebrate 'when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza'. The outcry in Germany was so massive that the then culture minister, Claudia Roth, felt compelled to announce that she had only applauded the Israeli film-maker, not his Palestinian counterpart. By contrast, the resolution made no mention of the 2019 Yom Kippur attack in Halle, in which a rightwing terrorist tried to break into a synagogue to commit a massacre (he failed to get inside, but killed two passersby). Nor did the resolution acknowledge the surely vital fact that 85% of all antisemitic violence in Germany is committed by rightwing perpetrators, and instead promised to combat antisemitism by 'exploiting repressive options' in asylum and citizenship law. In other words: they are the ones with the antisemitism problem, not us. When I was at school we read Friedrich, a novel by Hans Peter Richter, with the motto: 'Back then it was the Jews, today it's Black people, tomorrow it might be the whites, the Christians or the civil servants.' We didn't think that all forms of racism were the same as Hitler's antisemitism, but this was how we understood 'never again'. The problem with German exceptionalism is that it means we can't really learn from the Holocaust. In fact, in April a woman was fined €1,500 by a German court for holding up a sign outside a government building that read: 'Haven't we learned anything from the Holocaust?' That same week, the German legal system decided that shouting 'Piss off, foreigners! Germany for the Germans' wasn't a problem. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion A further irony is that many of the people accused of importing antisemitism into Germany may well have grandparents who fought for the allies against the Nazis. I wish we had learned about that at school. Just as I wish we'd teach children – and politicians – that the kind of eliminatory antisemitism that peaked during the Holocaust was a European phenomenon. That doesn't mean there is no antisemitism beyond Europe's borders, in the Arab world or otherwise, but it has a different history. Some antisemitic tropes, for example the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy, only found their way into the Levant during the second world war. Perhaps it would be more correct to speak of exported antisemitism. Mithu Sanyal is a novelist, academic, literary critic, columnist and broadcaster.
