In Belfast last week, a Sudanese asylum seeker horrifically attacked a man in his 40s, blinding him in one eye and slashing his face and back with a kitchen knife. Here are a few images of what followed: masked men roamed the streets of Belfast chanting “foreigners out”; a Ugandan nurse fainted in panic as a violent mob threatened to break into her home; two Indian women said they wanted to leave Belfast after their home was severely damaged.

As the centre of the Troubles that ravaged Northern Ireland between the 1960s and the late 1990s, Belfast is no stranger to violence. And yet the visuals of masked men hunting immigrant homes, attacking anyone who “looks foreign,” are chilling. The Times and the New Statesman have gone as far as to use the word “pogrom” to describe the violence. What’s more, Belfast is not the only city in the UK gripped by such unrest. Recent attacks by those seeking asylum or of foreign descent have triggered waves of anti-migrant protests, as we saw in Southampton, Birmingham, Manchester, London, and Southport.

Anti-immigration sentiment is running so high that Reform UK—the right-wing, anti-immigration party rebranded from the Brexit Party in 2021—dominated the local council elections this May. Hotels housing asylum seekers have become hotbeds of vicious protests. And “Unite the Kingdom” rallies—bringing together people united by xenophobia and a palpable desire for a white Christian nation—have attracted thousands.

In Westminster, politics looks just as volatile. As I write, Sir Keir Starmer has announced that he will step down as Prime Minister, paving the way for Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in the ten years since 2016. Starmer’s tenure was marked by persistent accusations of mismanaging immigration and losing control of Britain’s borders. The issue became so politically salient that last year he delivered an unusually stark warning that without strong and fair rules, the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together".

How did the UK get so obsessed with immigration? And is less of it really the answer to the economic, political, and cultural malaise that plagues this country?

In the wake of the killing of the 18-year-old Southampton student Henry Nowak, US Vice President J.D. Vance posted on social media what quickly went viral. His post read:

“Henry Nowak died the same way a civilisation dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”

Vance was not alone. Leading right-wing figures in Britain such as Rupert Lowe have laid the blame for this alleged problem at the feet of the post-war elite. But is this accurate? What are the immigration figures? And what is the broader history of immigration in post-war Britain, as it ceased to be an Empire?

At the level of citizenship policy alone, post-war Britain has only grown more stringent. In 1948, the Attlee government passed the British Nationality Act, which allowed anyone born in Britain or the Commonwealth to attain the right to work, vote, and migrate to Britain. The law was far from benign. As imperial influence waned, Britain sought to retain its status as a global power by symbolically asserting itself as the “mother country”, scarcely believing its erstwhile subjects would actually use this right to migrate.

Free entry under this framework remained in place until 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act effectively ended open migration from the Commonwealth—the only period in modern history when acquiring the right to live in Britain was genuinely accessible to all its subjects. Since the Notting Hill and Nottingham race riots of 1958, and amid growing anxiety about the scale of migration, both Conservative and Labour governments steadily narrowed the scope of citizenship. Even the Maastricht Treaty, which eased mobility across the EU, did not liberalise routes to citizenship. And even the Blair government, often presented as the apotheosis of British multiculturalism, oversaw the introduction of the “Life in the UK” test and similar measures restricting citizenship pathways.

But what about immigration itself? Citizenship rights and immigration rights are distinct, and perhaps the rise of the far right—and the recent bouts of violence—has more to do with immigration than with the nuances of citizenship law.

The numbers

As of 2024, approximately a fifth of the UK population was born outside the country. Right up until Brexit, the UK also received high levels of EU immigration, especially after newer member states joined the bloc in the 2000s. The UK is home to roughly 10 per cent of all international students worldwide, accounting for a substantial portion of non-EU migration. And even after Brexit reduced the number of EU entrants, the new framework expanded non-EU migration by removing the cap on skilled-worker visas. At its peak—the year ending March 2023—net migration reached approximately 9,44,000, or roughly 1.4 per cent of the population.

Since then, however, these numbers have fallen substantially. Total net migration stood at approximately 1,71,000 in the year ending December 2025, a decline of nearly 82 per cent from the 2023 peak. Net migration of non-EU nationals stood at 3,50,000. A large proportion of these continue to be international students. Increasingly difficult routes to citizenship, alongside difficulties in finding visa sponsors, have also constrained overall numbers.

Unauthorised migration too—which has captured the imagination of Reform voters and much of the British press—is more complicated than the headlines suggest. The number arriving via small boats on the English Channel shot up from 2021, reaching its peak of approximately 45,774 in 2022—still less than 0.07 per cent of its population. After a dip in 2023, arrivals rose again to approximately 41,472 in 2025. Roughly 1,09,343 people claimed asylum in the UK in the year ending March 2025, but compared with France, Germany, Italy, and Spain the number of asylum seekers per head of population remained relatively low—17th across all European countries.

So what is driving this backlash? If citizenship laws have only become more restrictive and overall net migration has fallen sharply, what explains the rise of Reform and Restore Britain in the same period? Or the violence of the last two years?

Looking for explanations

One explanation is that such tensions have always existed in the UK. This is partly true. Many parts of England have seen racial unrest before. But there is little empirical data suggesting anything comparable to what we have seen recently. A more commonly cited explanation is that the post-COVID economic decline has flared passions. From 2021, and especially after the Ukraine war, inflation has risen sharply, unemployment has remained at around 5 per cent, and while GDP has seen modest improvement, GDP per capita has remained essentially flat.

Economic hardship alone, however, does not explain the current moment. If it did, the fiercest unrest would have coincided with the 2008-09 crash or the immediate post-COVID slump, and we would expect similar patterns in other high-immigration countries facing comparable economic pressures. The evidence does not support this.

If not economics, not a restrictive citizenship regime, not lax immigration policy, and not the small boats—which remain largely a wedge issue—what is happening?

An identity in crisis

The UK, I would argue, is in the midst of an identity crisis, with no coherent national story about its past or its future. Other high-income countries—Canada, Sweden, Switzerland—receive similar or even higher levels of immigration in percentage terms and yet report far fewer episodes of rioting. Canada, last year, voted for the Liberal Mark Carney over the more conservative Pierre Poilievre despite rumblings against immigration and multiculturalism. What has allowed these countries to remain relatively stable, while the UK has reached a boiling point?

All four countries face demographic pressures, fiscal constraints, and politicised debates about migration. The key distinction lies in how national identity is imagined and institutionalised. France’s identity is built around republican, secularist values; the Swiss identity on direct democracy and federalism; the Canadian identity on civic patriotism, multiculturalism, and bilingualism. American identity, for all its contradictions, rests on a clear thread of Lockean liberalism and individual rights.

The UK, by contrast, has faced a profound crisis of national identity over the last 70 years, in which older imperial narratives have been discredited and no equally compelling, inclusive successor has taken firm hold. Before the 1950s, British national identity was largely bound up with its status as a global power—marked by a strain of perfectionist liberalism and the logic of spreading liberty and democracy across the world. By the 1950s, however, the Empire had ceased to be a legitimate form of political association, and British influence was steadily declining.

By the end of the 20th century, not only had the Empire’s influence diminished significantly, but it had come under immense international and domestic scrutiny. Academic and cultural discourse within the UK was saturated with post-colonial critique; any positive invocation of the Empire had become politically untenable as a basis for national identity.

While Canada and the US built robust identities around civic commitments and constitutional patriotism—and France could always fall back on the ideals of 1789—the UK had no such widely accepted ideal to draw on. It was left without a story to tell both its long-standing inhabitants and its newer immigrants.

Why stories matter

How much does a national story—a sense of shared identity—actually matter? The short answer is: a great deal. Strong national identities often allow for greater social cohesion. They lend legitimacy to redistributive policies and welfarist frameworks. They allow citizens to relate to one another and feel part of a shared political project, conferring meaning, purpose, and dignity. They also provide the emotional foundations on which democratic institutions depend—encouraging citizens to accept sacrifices for the common good and to trust strangers as fellow members of a shared community. Without some sense of common belonging, politics becomes little more than a competition between rival interest groups. Nations are not the only source of solidarity, but history suggests they remain among the most powerful and durable forms of collective attachment.

Despite the rise of Donald Trump and an unmistakable hardening of immigration policy, the US still offers an example of how a powerful national story can both constrain and channel anti-immigrant politics. The primary battleground remains electoral and institutional rather than the street or the mob. And many pro-immigration actors continue to appeal to a shared, if contested, constitutional patriotism and America’s integrative national identity as the very basis for inclusion.

Countries with a confident national identity can be more tolerant of immigrants because they know who they are. Countries with weaker national identities tend to be more insecure about their self-image, and more hostile to those who seem to disrupt a disappearing sense of self. The violence in Belfast, Southampton, Southport, and London all point to an increasingly insecure nation that has no distinct and inclusive story to draw on. In the absence of such a story, resentment and anxiety rush in to fill the vacuum, turning social tensions into battles over belonging. Rebuilding a shared national narrative is therefore a key precondition for beginning to address this anger.

The UK’s dilemma is not easily solvable. It cannot turn to its modern history for a non-exploitative, non-dominating story of national identity. Whether it will choose the path of Cameron-esque muscular liberalism, Canadian-style civic patriotism, or simply attempt to rehabilitate some vague vision of Empire, we will have to wait and see.

The one other country in western Europe facing a similar obsession with immigration—and an insidious rise of the far right—is Germany. A coincidence? Unlikely.

Siddharth G. Khare is a DPhil candidate in Political Theory at Oxford where I look at nationalism, secularism and complex historical legacies. 

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