Nearly a quarter of voters want negative immigration
A return to pre-2000 levels.
A new poll for The Telegraph, conducted by Merlin Strategy, shows that 23% of voters want less than zero net migration to the United Kingdom. A further 23% want net zero migration, and 17% want less than 10,000 a year. 22% want between 10,000 and 100,000.
This means that, collectively, an astounding 85% of Brits want migration levels below where they were in the year 2000.
The current political consensus on immigration is imploding. The government has quietly admitted in its white paper that the economic case for immigration is nonsense, while YouGov’s latest polling puts immigration as the most important issue for voters.
Only 5% of respondents said they were happy with the current level of immigration, ranging from half a million to over a million annually.
As it stands, Britain’s population growth is due entirely to immigration. When discussions around infrastructure, school places, NHS waiting times, housing shortages, and all the other crises facing our country that are connected to the number of people here, is it any wonder the average person wants lower immigration?
The 100,000 figure
The only party in the last fifteen years to commit to a target of 100,000 net migration a year was the Conservative Party in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos. In fact, the 2010 manifesto committed lower:
We do not need to attract people to do jobs that could be carried out by british citizens, given the right training and support. So we will take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.
As David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere has made clear, there is a consistent consensus for lower immigration among British voters - but this has been routinely ignored or neglected by the political elite. Given it was the Conservative Party itself that was in government for fourteen of the last fifteen years, this is a failure on a spectacular scale. As the think tank Migration Watch wrote after the first five years of that government, many of the policies introduced were reasonable, but needed to go further.
However, when that opportunity to go further came with Brexit, and the liberalisation of Britain’s migration policy, it was squandered. When the former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who presided over the explosion in immigration that has been nicknamed the ‘Boriswave’, defended her record on immigration - both in August 2024 and January 2025 - it was seen by many as the final nail in the coffin for the Conservatives’ credibility on immigration.
The emerging net zero consensus
Introducing the phrase “net zero” into British politics has been an incredible innovation. Turned away from the original use of CO2 emissions, it is now being used to describe the most sensible approach to Britain’s immigration policies.
Are forced deportations necessary? Is remigration the future of British immigration? It might not be needed - emigration numbers are naturally high, with 557,000 leaving in 2022, an increase of 118,000 on the previous year. Even a cap of 10,000 on net migration might solve the issue - and would be politically popular. This poll proves it.