Britain must prepare for a new era of high immigration caused by UK domestic need and changes in global economics and politics, a new think-tank paper has suggested.

The post-pandemic immigration rate of 1.1m arrivals a year could be the start of a trend towards historically high migration levels in the coming decades, according to the Social Market Foundation (SMF).

Britain’s ageing population and skills shortages will mean the country has an ongoing demand for migrant workers. Meanwhile, Britain has longstanding ties with the most populous and still growing nations, whose own demographic changes will mean they have large numbers of young people looking for jobs and opportunities elsewhere in the world.

Jonathan Thomas, a senior fellow at the SMF, argues that British politics and policy need to be better prepared for an era of high migration flows.

In a report entitled Routes to Resolution, he suggests:

• Britain should explore “skills partnerships” with migrants’ home countries, supporting the training of workers in those countries some of whom could then bring those skills to Britain.  “The UK should focus on helping to strategically shape migration sustainably on mutually beneficial terms with those countries from which the UK is receiving migrants”, said Thomas.
• Immigrant workers must be shown to be “supplementing, not supplanting,” the UK workforce, he added.
• Significant reform of the international refugee system, to break the bond between where people claim asylum and where they settle.  “Only a system where an asylum claim represents just an entry into the system rather than a final destination can remove the incentives that drive the people-smuggling business model”, he wrote.
• Britain should strike a meaningful deal with France to curb the Channel chaos, but to be able to return migrants to France will require the UK to take in more refugees, from France and/or elsewhere in the EU. “The UK should accept that France has no obligation and little incentive to help Britain on asylum, particularly during times when France has received asylum applications at roughly three times the UK rate and accepts a greater number of refugees than the UK does.”