Immigration the last thing in the Tories' armour?

[Eric the Half a Bee]

UK paid Rwanda an extra £100m for asylum deal https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67656220

£240 million so far….just insane amount with not one person deported. With net migration over 600,000 ( can’t imagine how bad it is where all these people are coming from to want to live in this depressing wet rip off shithole called the uk but hey ho) this year something has to be done? Do they not just police the channel better? Use the army etc? How much would a few more surveillance boats cost to stop the flow?

And you've made the mistake of assuming most of those 600,000 are coming in on boats.

Some immigration stats might be of help here. In 2022 the vast majority of immigration into the UK came from non-EU countries. Immigration to the UK from the EU has nosedived since Brexit (surprise, surprise). Of non-EU immigration:

39% came to the UK to study
25% came to the UK to work with visas
19% came to the UK for humanitarian reasons (this was up significantly from previous years due to the war in Ukraine)
8% were asylum seekers (76,000)

Around 40,000 arrived in boats and 90% of them were granted asylum status.