Whilst I was in India, through a strange sequence of events, I reconnected with someone I hiked with in the USA in 2019. We lost touch during the pandemic.
We met a couple of times after I returned home. First, for a walk and picnic in Richmond Park and then again for a trip to Kew Gardens.
When we were having ice cream at a picnic table, this fearless jackdaw joined us. On another table, an Indian couple were talking in “Indian”. Despite there being many languages in India, I recognised their one. The man was very dark, which reinforced my guess. I asked them if they were from Kerala. They were!
In Kerala, the primary language is Malayalam. It’s more popular than the national language, Hindi. When I was in Kerala, someone tried to teach me how to count to ten. It was impossible! When spoken fast, the language sounds to me like a machine gun! Someone I met described it that way and it’s stuck in my head.
The Indian couple weren’t a couple. They were friends. The man was a photographer and the woman worked in finance. I asked them how they coped with the British weather since Kerala is over 30°C all year round. “With difficulty!”, they replied.
Many Indians end up working abroad because not enough jobs are being created for India’s expanding population. They would rather be at home, in the warmth.
On my recent trip to India, I met many people. Some were taxi drivers who’d worked in the UAE (Dubai or Abu Dhabi) or elsewhere in the Middle East. They worked there to earn money for themselves or their families before returning home. On my first trip, I met a kind person returning from Australia when I arrived in Kerala.
One of India’s biggest sources of income is remittances. I didn’t know what this meant until I went there. It’s simply people sending money back to relatives and friends in India. Money that might not seem like a lot in one country can be considerable in India.
When growing up, I remember my mum used to regularly send postal orders to relatives in India. I don’t know if postal orders still exist though there are faster ways of sending money now. This has been going on for a while and migrants from other countries do the same.
In the UK, like some of Europe and the US, there’s a fierce debate about immigration going on. Much of the noise is about asylum seekers. Some people put immigration and asylum seekers into one bucket. The bulk of the people entering the UK are immigrants who’ve come to work and study. In the year to June 2025, about 900,000 immigrants came to the UK. The number of people who left the UK was about 700,000. So the population increased by about 200,000.
The number of asylum seekers was about 100,000. So for every one asylum seeker, nine immigrants were allowed into the UK by the British government. And about 1 in 3 of the asylum seekers entered the UK “irregularly”, for example, via small boats. Put another way, about 96 people out of 100 entered the country “properly”.
Here are the 2024 asylum applications per million of the country’s population. This lets you compare countries taking into account their populations. In this list, Greece had most applications (per million) and Nigeria the least. The UK is number 20.
| Rank | Destination country | Per million inhabitants | Applications for asylum |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Greece | 6,639 | 68,967 |
| 2 | Costa Rica | 5,513 | 28,279 |
| 3 | Cyprus | 5,377 | 7,303 |
| 4 | Canada | 4,208 | 173,756 |
| 5 | Egypt | 3,723 | 433,818 |
| 6 | Ireland | 3,432 | 18,467 |
| 7 | Spain | 3,423 | 167,058 |
| 8 | Moldova | 3,406 | 8,138 |
| 9 | Germany | 2,751 | 229,710 |
| 10 | Uruguay | 2,722 | 9,217 |
| 11 | Italy | 2,687 | 158,482 |
| 12 | Slovenia | 2,668 | 5,673 |
| 13 | Belgium | 2,603 | 30,911 |
| 14 | Switzerland | 2,515 | 22,717 |
| 15 | Austria | 2,415 | 22,165 |
| 16 | France | 1,898 | 130,012 |
| 17 | Bulgaria | 1,897 | 12,226 |
| 18 | Netherlands | 1,778 | 31,999 |
| 19 | Togo | 1,668 | 15,870 |
| 20 | United Kingdom | 1,561 | 108,061 |
| 21 | Kenya | 1,559 | 88,002 |
| 22 | Central African Republic | 1,537 | 8,195 |
| 23 | Peru | 947 | 32,412 |
| 24 | United States of America | 859 | 292,232 |
| 25 | Norway | 856 | 4,772 |
| 26 | Benin | 704 | 10,175 |
| 27 | Sweden | 641 | 6,773 |
| 28 | Mexico | 603 | 78,906 |
| 29 | Uganda | 593 | 29,667 |
| 30 | Israel | 587 | 5,857 |
| 31 | Zambia | 538 | 11,478 |
| 32 | Tajikistan | 501 | 5,307 |
| 33 | Tunisia | 440 | 5,398 |
| 34 | Poland | 435 | 15,889 |
| 35 | Niger | 426 | 11,515 |
| 36 | Chad | 404 | 8,206 |
| 37 | Ecuador | 388 | 7,045 |
| 38 | South Korea | 354 | 18,317 |
| 39 | Sudan | 341 | 17,222 |
| 40 | Brazil | 321 | 68,086 |
| 41 | Malaysia | 293 | 10,420 |
| 42 | Cameroon | 275 | 7,999 |
| 43 | Malawi | 181 | 3,916 |
| 44 | Colombia | 127 | 6,698 |
| 45 | Morocco | 113 | 4,298 |
| 46 | South Africa | 110 | 7,072 |
| 47 | Japan | 101 | 12,564 |
| 48 | Democratic Republic of the Congo | 56 | 6,089 |
| 49 | Russia | 49 | 6,967 |
| 50 | Nigeria | 45 | 10,526 |
These are applications. The number of asylum applicants who are accepted is another story.
Migration is clearly an issue that divides people. Economists generally think immigration benefits a country, especially where there is a low birth rate and a labour shortage. You need a reasonably sized working population to pay for things like people’s pensions. There’s some evidence that, over time, working age migrants give more to the country than they get in return. However, there is a part of the population who are against “small boats” and possibly immigration altogether. There are many reasons for this.
My feeling is that when people’s lives are going well, they don’t tend to think about these issues. But when life is hard (as it is for many people in the UK and elsewhere), politicians can exploit people’s unhappiness. They propose easy solutions, such as blaming asylum seekers or immigrants or another group. In reality, there’s rarely a quick solution. For example, people thought their lives would improve after the UK left the EU — because that’s what they were promised. Regardless of the merits of leaving the EU, people’s lives didn’t improve and the pandemic made life harder.
Politicians in this case are copying advertising techniques. Advertisements create a gap between the current you and a future happier you. And, of course, the way to that happier future is to buy the product being advertised. If only life were that simple.