What If Every Immigrant Left Britain Tomorrow?

Imagine waking up tomorrow to find that every immigrant in Britain had suddenly disappeared.

The doctors, nurses and care workers who arrived from overseas were gone. International students had vanished from university campuses. Workers had disappeared from businesses, restaurants and workplaces. Some families would wake up with a parent, partner or relative missing.

It is an extreme and unrealistic scenario, but stripping immigration out of Britain overnight provides an interesting way of examining just how closely migration is connected with employment, healthcare, universities, public finances, elections and everyday community life.

And Newcastle would certainly notice.

Tens of thousands could disappear from Newcastle.

Exactly how many people disappeared would depend entirely on how "immigrant" was defined.

Country of birth provides one useful measure. Census 2021 recorded Newcastle upon Tyne's population at around 300,000. Approximately 247,800 residents were UK-born, meaning roughly 52,300, or 17.4 per cent, were born outside the UK.

That is around one person in every six residents.

Across the wider North East, immigration is considerably lower than in many parts of Britain. ONS figures show approximately 179,000 North East residents were born outside the UK in 2021, equivalent to 6.8 per cent of the region's population. Nationally, 10 million of the 59.6 million people living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, around 16.8 per cent.

Removing those populations overnight would therefore be nothing like simply changing an immigration target for future arrivals. It would remove people already embedded within workplaces, households and communities.

The employment shock would be immediate.

The first major problem would be staffing.

An overnight removal would create vacancies without providing replacement workers to fill them. Businesses would potentially lose employees at every level, while the disappearance of customers and consumers would simultaneously reduce demand.

Some wages could rise as employers competed for a smaller pool of workers. However, businesses unable to recruit could cut opening hours, reduce production, automate jobs, relocate or close.

The disruption would also be uneven. Industries with greater reliance on overseas workers would experience much larger shocks than those employing predominantly British workers.

There would be another complication. Removing millions of residents also removes millions of people who buy food, rent homes, travel, visit pubs and restaurants and purchase goods and services.

The country would simultaneously experience a labour supply shock and a consumer demand shock.

The NHS could face a major staffing crisis.

Healthcare provides perhaps the clearest example of the consequences.

House of Commons Library analysis of NHS workforce data found around 325,000 NHS staff in England reported a non-British nationality in June 2025, roughly one in five workers whose nationality was known.

Among doctors, approximately 36 per cent reported a nationality other than British, while the figure for nurses was around 30 per cent.

The North East and Yorkshire had the lowest proportion among NHS regions, but even there approximately 13 per cent of staff reported a non-British nationality.

Nationality is not the same as immigration status, so these figures cannot tell us exactly how many workers would be affected by the hypothetical. Some non-British nationals may have lived in Britain for many years, while some immigrants will subsequently have become British citizens.

Nevertheless, the figures illustrate the scale of international participation in healthcare.

Trying to replace such workers instantly would be practically impossible. Training a new doctor or experienced nurse takes years, not weeks.

Social care would also feel the impact.

The consequences would extend beyond hospitals.

England's adult social care system has increasingly relied upon international recruitment during a period of persistent staffing difficulties. Skills for Care reported that the adult social care workforce contained around 1.71 million filled posts in 2023/24, while around 131,000 posts were vacant on any given day.

International recruitment had helped the workforce grow while vacancies fell.

An abrupt removal of overseas workers would therefore affect not only employment figures but potentially elderly and disabled people relying on carers for washing, dressing, medication, meals and everyday independence.

Families might then have to provide more unpaid care themselves, potentially reducing the hours they could spend at work.

Would Britain suddenly save billions in benefits?

One argument sometimes made about reducing immigration is that it would lower welfare spending.

The reality is more complicated.

Many temporary migrants cannot claim most benefits in the first place.

Home Office guidance states that the majority of temporary migrants are granted permission subject to "no recourse to public funds". Skilled Worker, Health and Care Worker, Student and Graduate visas are among routes normally carrying the restriction.

That means removing those migrants would not simply produce an equivalent saving in Universal Credit, housing assistance and other welfare expenditure.

Migrants also work, spend money and pay taxes. Removing a worker therefore potentially removes both the cost of services they consume and the tax revenue and economic activity they generate.

The eventual impact on government finances would depend heavily upon which migrants were removed, their ages, earnings, family circumstances and use of public services.

Newcastle's universities would look very different.

For Newcastle, one of the most visible transformations would happen on university campuses.

Newcastle University and Northumbria University said in 2023 that they hosted almost 18,000 overseas students between them, drawn from more than 140 countries.

Those students do considerably more than attend lectures.

They rent accommodation, shop locally, use public transport, visit restaurants and nightlife venues and bring tuition income into universities.

National research cited by Northumbria University estimated the net economic impact of international students across the UK at £41.9 billion for the 2021/22 cohort.

Removing international students would therefore affect landlords, shops, hospitality businesses and university finances alongside the campuses themselves.

Elections would change too.

The impact on democracy is more complicated than assuming immigrants either can or cannot vote.

British citizens can vote, regardless of whether they originally immigrated to Britain. Irish citizens and qualifying Commonwealth citizens can also vote in UK Parliamentary elections.

For local elections in England, eligibility additionally extends to qualifying EU citizens and EU citizens with retained rights.

Most other EU citizens cannot vote in UK Parliamentary elections.

A policy based upon immigration history would consequently raise extraordinary legal and constitutional questions if it attempted to remove naturalised British citizens. A policy based on foreign nationality would affect a different population entirely.

Either scenario could alter electorates in places such as Newcastle, although not every immigrant currently has voting rights.

Communities would lose more than workers.

Statistics can measure jobs and populations more easily than relationships.

An overnight mass removal would affect marriages, friendships, schools, religious organisations, sports clubs and neighbourhoods. British-born children could have foreign-born parents. Businesses could have overseas-born owners. Long-established residents could have spent decades in the UK.

Newcastle itself provides an example of how those connections have developed.

The city's non-UK-born population increased from approximately 37,600 in 2011 to around 52,300 in 2021. The number of Newcastle residents born in India alone increased from approximately 3,300 to 4,600 during that decade.

These residents are not contained within a separate economy. They are customers, colleagues, employers, tenants, homeowners, students and neighbours.

Britain would not simply return to an earlier version of itself.

Perhaps the biggest misconception exposed by the hypothetical is the idea that removing immigration would simply reset Britain to how it looked decades ago.

Modern economies do not work that way.

Jobs, housing, public services, businesses and universities have developed around the population that exists today. Removing millions of people instantaneously would alter both supply and demand.

There could be effects some people regarded as beneficial. Demand for some housing could fall sharply, for example, and employers facing worker shortages could have stronger incentives to raise wages, invest in technology or recruit economically inactive British residents.

At the same time, the sudden loss of workers, taxpayers, students, business owners and consumers would create severe disruption.

For Newcastle and the North East, the experiment demonstrates something broader about communal society.

People do not exist merely as figures in migration statistics. Each person can simultaneously be a worker, taxpayer, patient, neighbour, parent, voter, customer or carer.

Remove one part of that network overnight and the consequences would travel far beyond immigration policy itself.

Share your views.

What do you think would happen to Newcastle if immigration disappeared overnight?