Immigration in the devolved nations: the five-minute rundown

Immigration is a topic on the minds of many voters in Scotland and Wales, showing up in recent polling as people’s fourth and third most important political priority, in the respective nations. The nature of immigration is somewhat different in the devolved nations to the situation in England, which drives overall UK trends due to its greater size. Scotland and Wales contend with specific migration challenges to do with labour demands, higher education student numbers, and population change, while overall immigration policy is reserved at the UK level.

This piece does not cover Northern Ireland, which is not holding devolved parliamentary elections in 2026.

Scotland

The scale of migration to Scotland has consistently been lower than to England, in terms of the number of people coming in relative to the existing population. The result is that Scotland has a smaller migrant population in relation to its size than England and Wales: 10% foreign born compared with 17% in England, at the time of the latest censuses.

But migration has been more instrumental to population growth in Scotland than in England because natural change (births minus deaths) has been negative in Scotland each year since 2015.

Since 2020, internal migration from the rest of the UK has not been high enough to offset this decline. Without international migration, the population would have shrunk, although the scale of immigration since then has been around seven times higher than would have been needed to reach population stability.

Net migration to Scotland peaked at 64,000 in the year ending June 2023 and is forecasted to be as low as 4,000 in 2026. The latest ONS projections foresee the Scottish population declining from 2035 onwards, even with net migration stabilising at around 12,000 per year, although given the high immigration of recent years, the population may only return to its pre-Brexit level in 2059.

Migrants accounted for around 12% of payrolled employments in Scotland in 2024, although some industries are more reliant on migrant workers, including agriculture, forestry and fishing, and hospitality, where migrants accounted for more than 20% of employments. All sectors have seen a partial replacement of EU workers with non-EU workers since 2019.

Scottish universities attract high numbers of foreign higher education students, with official data showing that Scotland as a nation hosts more foreign students in numerical terms than some large European countries, including France and Italy, and more per capita than any country in Europe. The numbers enrolling at Scottish universities have declined slightly from a peak of 84,000 in 2022/23. There is no Scotland-specific data on how many students remain in Scotland after studying, although UK-wide, around 85% are still in the UK one year after arrival.

As of December 2025, Scotland was hosting around 6,700 asylum seekers, which was fewer relative to the size of its population than across the UK as a whole. Nearly 60% of Scotland’s asylum seekers live in Glasgow, which hosts the largest number of asylum seekers per head out of any local authority in the UK and the second largest in absolute terms (after Hillingdon in London). Around a quarter were housed in hotels, with hotel use in Scotland having risen since 2023 despite falling overall across the UK.

Wales

Immigration to Wales has followed a similar recent trend to England, having risen sharply after 2021 and started to fall again following a peak in 2023. In 2024, net international migration added around 23,000 people to the Welsh population.

Similar to Scotland, Wales has been experiencing net negative natural change (births minus deaths) since 2015, but migration from abroad and elsewhere in the UK has offset this and resulted in overall population growth. In 2021, around 7% of the Welsh population was non-UK-born, substantially below the equivalent figure of 17% in England.

The ONS’s latest projections have net migration falling to around 12,000 in 2026 before rising again slightly, continuing to offset negative natural change until 2037, when the Welsh population is expected to start shrinking. Given high levels of net migration in recent years, and similarly to Scotland, the Welsh population is only expected to return to its 2021 level in the 2060s.

At the latest count, in December 2025, Wales was hosting around 3,300 asylum seekers, just under half of whom (42%) were in Cardiff. Almost all (93%) were housed in dispersal accommodation. Two per cent were living in hotels, which was a smaller share – and absolute number – than in 2022. Wales has one of the lowest ratios of asylum seekers relative to its population size out of any UK region or nation, with around 1 for every 1,000 people compared with a UK-wide figure of 1.5.

Further resources

• Local data on migrants in the UK
• Net migration to the UK
• Where do migrants live in the UK?
• Asylum accommodation in the UK

Sources

• ONS, 2024-based national population projections: principal projections for Scotland, Wales, and England, 26 April 2026
• ONS, Estimates of the population for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland: Mid-2011 to mid-2024 edition, 26 September 2025
• ONS, 2021 Census of England and Wales, accessed via the Custom Table Builder
• Scottish Government, 2022 Scottish Census, accessed via the Flexible table builder
• HESA, Where do HE students come from?, 27 January 2026
• HMRC, Payrolled employments in the UK by nationality, region and industrial sector, from July 2014 to December 2024, 20 March 2025
• Home Office, Immigration system statistics quarterly: December 2025, table Asy_D11, 26 February 2026