So there it is: according to ONS figures published yesterday morning, net migration has plunged to 431,000. That’s almost a 50% drop from last year’s eye-watering total of 860,000.

Labour has greeted the news with quiet satisfaction. One backbench MP even borrowed the online term “Boriswave” to describe the Tory-engineered surge in numbers — a fitting label for the chaos unleashed by Boris Johnson’s uncapped, loophole-riddled “points-based system”.

To its credit, Labour isn’t pretending this drop is its doing. Because it isn’t. Instead, there is rare agreement across the political spectrum that this is the delayed impact of then-Home Secretary James Cleverley’s reforms from the dying days of the Rishi Sunak government. The key changes involved a sharp rise in salary thresholds for migrant workers, and a ban on care workers and most postgraduate students bringing dependants. It didn’t take a prophet to see this coming — just basic common sense and a calculator.

But let’s not get carried away. Yes, net migration has halved — but it’s still twice what it was in the pre-Brexit years, when annual figures hovered around 200,000 to 250,000. A net inflow of 430,000 is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Bristol every single year.

Rather than reversing New Labour’s legacy, this is damage control for a Tory-made disaster. Cleverley was trying to mop up the mess left by Johnson and Priti Patel, the architects of the broken post-Brexit immigration system. The irony is that Patel, who helped blow the floodgates wide open, is now somehow Shadow Foreign Secretary. Evidently, logic isn’t a requirement for a job in Kemi Badenoch’s top team.

Even so, Cleverley didn’t go far enough. There were no caps on work or humanitarian visas. The absurd “graduate visa”, which allows international students to stay for up to three years with zero conditions, remains untouched. And, crucially, no attempt was made to disapply the Human Rights Act for illegal immigration cases, which continues to act as a de facto veto on deportations.

For all Cleverley’s tough talk, he stopped short of what public opinion has long supported: serious reductions, firm sunset clauses, and a clear tilt toward genuinely high-skilled migration, rather than open-ended routes to permanent settlement. Bolder action likely wouldn’t have saved the Tories at the ballot box, but it would’ve helped them rebuild. Instead, they bottled it.

Labour, for its part, appears to want to bring numbers down even further. Some of its proposals, laid out in a white paper earlier this month, are promising. Extending the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from five to 10 years is smart. Scrapping the careworker visa — a route that’s been wide open to abuse, wage suppression and, in some cases, outright modern slavery — is long overdue.

But if Labour is serious, it’ll need to fund these reforms properly. You can’t just ban careworker visas without investing in a domestic workforce. That means giving care providers the funding to pay better wages and offer stable contracts.

Then there’s the EU youth mobility scheme, which was quietly agreed behind the scenes and will allow under-30s from EU countries to live and work in the UK. While we don’t yet know the numbers, it’s clear that it will add pressure to housing, transport, and services — especially in already overstretched urban areas.

Labour’s proposed “Skills England” body, intended to align visa policy with workforce planning, also sounds good on paper. But the concept is full of problems. Labour market forecasting is notoriously unreliable: sectors change, technologies disrupt, and demand shifts quickly. As Madeleine Sumption of the Migration Observatory puts it, trying to build policy on that basis is like stacking a house of cards on a moving table.

And here’s the deeper risk: if Skills England becomes just another excuse to keep importing cheap labour under the banner of “shortages”, Britain will be back where it started. Rather than address the root causes — low pay, poor working conditions, lack of domestic training — we’ll keep papering over the cracks with migration. Again.

Net migration may be down, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for a turning point. It’s more like the first crack in the dam. And unless Labour — or any other party — is willing to challenge the economic model which treats mass immigration as a convenience rather than a cost, the dam will burst again.

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Mike Jones is a political scientist, specialising in migration.

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