Migrants are not responsible for the UK’s healthcare crisis

They are not a burden on the NHS, but a vital part of how it functions.NHS doctor and writer from Birmingham.Published On 19 Feb 2026Last week, Reform UK’s newest MP, Suella Braverman, and the party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf, argued that high levels of migration are placing unsustainable pressure on GP services, leaving British patients struggling to get appointments. This follows new data released by the Centre for Migration Control, suggesting that 752,000 migrants joined the GP register last year.The Centre for Migration Control, a think tank focused on reducing immigration in the United Kingdom, based its claim on Flag-4 GP registrations, a category that counts anyone whose previous address was outside the UK for three months or more – a group that can include returning British residents as well as new arrivals. The figure of 752,000 Flag-4 registrations may seem large, but it accounted for just more than one in 10 of the roughly 6.5 million new GP registrations last year, a share that falls well short of the “unquenchable demand” Reform portrays. While the party continues to blame immigration for GP access pressures, it overlooks a central fact about the NHS workforce: More than 40 percent of doctors currently licensed to practise in the UK qualified overseas, and international graduates now make up the majority of new entrants to the medical register. The system Reform claims is being overwhelmed by migrants is, in reality, heavily sustained by them. Yet rhetoric tying GP shortages solely to migrant patients is becoming more frequent.These claims echo across the UK’s wider far right. Tommy Robinson, the anti-Islam activist and former leader of the English Defence League, has repeatedly claimed the NHS is being “swamped by the rest of the world”, framing healthcare as another border to be defended. In this telling, the NHS becomes the last national institution under siege from migration. Yet the NHS is woven into Britain’s sense of itself. Almost every citizen has relied on it at some point in their lives, as it was designed to serve people from cradle to grave, and the emotional attachment to it remains strong despite its present strains. But unlike other parts of British life that politicians routinely blame migrants for reshaping, the NHS has always been intertwined with migration – just not for the reasons now being invoked.