Immigration is a story about who gets to be 'we'

There are political arguments where I know instinctively where I stand.

Immigration is harder. I’m British. I’m also Thai.

Here is the smallest example I know of why that matters. A British consultant living in Bangkok is an expat. A Myanmar construction worker living in Bangkok is a migrant worker. Both have moved countries. Both are working. Both intend to send money home and may or may not stay.

The words are not describing the movement. They are describing the status of the person doing it, and they do it so quietly that most people using them have never noticed they made a choice.

This is not an argument for or against immigration. It is an argument about what immigration reveals: that facts do not arrive with a narrative attached, and something has to supply one.

The same number, several stories

Take the headline figure. Net migration to the UK was 171,000 in the year ending December 2025 — 813,000 people arriving, 642,000 leaving — down from 331,000 the year before and from a peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023.

You can build two sentences from that, both accurate.

Net migration is still adding 171,000 people to a country already under pressure on housing, infrastructure and public services.

Net migration has fallen by more than 80% from its peak, changing the scale of the question entirely.

Neither is false. The editorial decision is what you make the number mean.

But there is a sharper version of this point available, and it does not require me to construct anything.

That peak figure has been restated three times. It was 894,000. Then 906,000, attached to a different year. Now 944,000. The year ending December 2024 has travelled from 431,000 to 345,000 to 331,000 — the largest single revision driven by British emigration being restated from 77,000 to 257,000.

Same country, same period, same statistical agency. The number moved because the method for counting who had left improved.

If a figure this central can be revised by that much, then anyone who built an argument on the earlier version was arguing about something that turned out not to be the case — and almost nobody went back to check.

What gets collapsed

Underneath the headline the picture is messier still. Of non-EU arrivals in the year ending December 2025, 47% came to study, 23% for work, 14% were asylum applicants, with smaller shares arriving for family and humanitarian reasons.

Public argument compresses all of that into one word.

A student on a master’s course. A nurse recruited to a hospital. Someone joining a spouse. A refugee who has fled persecution. Someone who entered illegally. Someone who has lived here legally for twenty years and is applying to settle.

Once those become a single category, evidence about one becomes evidence about all. A story about asylum accommodation becomes a story about immigration. An individual crime becomes a pattern about migrants. A labour shortage becomes an argument for. A housing shortage becomes an argument against.

The compression is not incidental. It is what makes the argument winnable without being true, because you can always find one member of a category who supports the claim you want to make about all of them.

Thailand, where the pronouns change

In Britain I am British. In Thailand I am Thai. And in Thailand it is somebody else’s turn to be the migrant.

Thai agriculture, construction and manufacturing run substantially on workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. Then in mid-2025 the border conflict with Cambodia sent workers home, and the numbers are worth separating carefully, because they are usually reported as one thing.

Registered Cambodian workers in Thailand fell from 493,570 in November 2024 to 396,179 a year later — a drop of about a fifth. Separately, well over 900,000 migrant workers are reported to have returned to Cambodia during the hostilities.

Those two figures do not describe the same population, and the gap between them is the most informative thing in the paragraph: it is roughly where the unregistered workforce lives, visible only when something goes wrong badly enough to move it.

What happened next in Thailand was a labour shortage, and a rapid public rediscovery that these were people the economy needed.

Something similar has happened at the border camps. Tens of thousands of people from Myanmar have lived there for decades — many born there. In August 2025 the Thai government adopted a resolution allowing working-age refugees in nine camps to take legal employment from that October, across 43 of Thailand’s 77 provinces and in most sectors.

The same person can travel through several categories without changing at all:

refugee → burden on the state → potential worker → part of the economy

Describe someone as a refugee and you foreground displacement. As a migrant, movement. As a worker, contribution. As a foreigner, difference. As a neighbour, and the frame changes again.

I want to resist the tidy conclusion here, because it is available and it is too easy. The tidy conclusion is that economic necessity reveals the anxiety as unfounded — that once the workers leave and the crops rot, everyone discovers they were wrong. But an economy needing someone is not the same as a society having decided anything, and a country can rely on people it has not made up its mind about for a very long time. Britain does it. Thailand does it. The necessity does not settle the argument. It just makes the argument harder to have honestly.

Several arguments wearing one coat

Part of why these exchanges go badly is that they are not one argument. Immigration is simultaneously a debate about wages, housing, public services, refugee protection, border enforcement, crime, culture, national identity, demographic change, citizenship and belonging.

Someone worried about their local housing waiting list and someone talking about obligations to refugees both believe they are discussing immigration. They are not discussing the same question, and no amount of evidence about one will settle the other.

Separating the questions before building the narrative is most of the editorial work.

Questions worth asking of any of it

• Which group are we actually talking about?
• What does the evidence say about that group, rather than about migrants generally?
• Total arrivals, or net of those who left?
• Which vintage of the figure is this, and has it been revised?
• Correlation, or a claim about cause?
• Whose experience is missing from this account?
• What trade-off is this argument avoiding?
• What story would the same evidence tell if the people in it were described differently?

What this is not

None of this means the arguments are only stories.

There are real pressures on housing and public services in specific places, and saying so is not a coded position. Businesses genuinely depend on migrant labour, and saying that is not a coded position either. Governments have legitimate authority over borders. Refugees genuinely need protection. Integration creates real difficulties that are not resolved by declaring them imaginary. Immigration also generates substantial economic and cultural value, and the evidence for that is not weaker for being unfashionable.

Paying attention to narrative is not a way of dissolving those facts into interpretation. It is the opposite. Every one of the claims above becomes easier to test once you have established which group, which period, which measure and which comparison is being used — and narrative is what usually prevents that from being established.

The point is not that evidence does not matter. It is that evidence does not organise itself, and whoever organises it has made decisions that are rarely visible in the finished sentence.

Who gets to be ‘we’

Which brings me to the most powerful word in the whole argument, and the one nobody defines.

We can’t take everyone. We need more workers. We should look after our own. We are a nation of immigrants.

Every one of those sentences depends on an answer to a question that almost never gets asked out loud.

I find it unusually hard to answer. Being British and Thai means I belong to two different versions of we, and which one I am inside depends on which airport I last walked through. The people described as them change with me.

The strongest narratives rarely persuade by inventing facts. They persuade by deciding which facts belong together, which matter most, what causes what, which words describe the people involved, and who is inside the story.

Immigration may be the clearest available demonstration, because underneath the numbers and the policy sits a question that is almost embarrassingly simple.

Who gets to be we?

I suspect the quality of the argument depends almost entirely on how honestly we are willing to answer it.