The message that non-white people are unwelcome in the UK got louder in 2025 – here’s the proof

It seemed that 2024 would be the year of anti-migrant hate in the UK after the summer riots: rampant misinformation that the Wales-born Southport killer arrived on a small boat, checkpoints where drivers were assessed on their skin colour, mobs attempting to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers. 

But while the country avoided a repeat of anti-migrant street violence in 2025, the message that non-white people – ranging from recently arrived refugees to third-generation children – are unwelcome in the UK has only become louder.

It is not inherently racist to debate or disagree with immigration. But it is hard not to see a rising tide of explicit hate emerging online – for which there is extensive data and which supports offline mobilisation.

At the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, we’ve been taking a look at how this rhetoric has spread, measuring how many people are seeing posts which use emerging anti-migrant language.

Take the growing prominence of discourse about remigration in the UK. The term calls for full-scale and typically forced deportation of anyone of migrant origin (almost invariably meaning non-white people) from Western countries, regardless of their citizenship status or legal right to stay. Once most associated with Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, however, it has spread from the continent to the heart of anti-migrant discourse in the UK.

In 2023, posts on X discussing remigration which mentioned the UK received a little more than one million views, before surging to almost 55 million views in 2024. In 2025 to date, these posts have received a staggering 420 million views.

Many lauded protests for remigration held in cities including Manchester, Birmingham and Nuneaton. Others sought to position mass deportations of non-white people as the ‘centrist’ option, implying that they should be grateful that they do not receive mass violence or executions instead.

Read more:

• From Southport to Epping, social media’s failure to act is fuelling racist violence
• This Greater Manchester group patrols schools looking for ‘outsiders’ – and it’s dividing the community
• A day inside the clogged-up asylum court at the heart of Starmer’s plans to close migrant hotels

There has been a similar spike in talk of an immigrant “invasion”, transmuting arrivals on small boats into a great heathen army. Posts mentioning a migrant invasion of the UK received 275 million views in 2023, 600 million in 2024 and 1.4 billion in 2025 to date.

Much of this is unsurprisingly targeted at asylum seekers and irregular migration. The summer was marked by protests targeting hotels in Epping, Canary Wharf and other parts of the country – a situation not helped by colossal unforced errors including the accidental release of an Ethiopian man who sexually assaulted a woman and a girl. 

But anti-migrant actors are increasingly agnostic as to who they target so long as they’re ‘foreign’ – even when they are elected politicians, from groups not so long ago cynically deemed ‘model minorities’. In 2024, only one out of the top 10 responses to X posts celebrating Diwali by former prime minister Rishi Sunak and shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel was negative. By 2025, eight out of 10 featured either anti-Indian schoolyard scatology or explicit claims that to celebrate a Hindu festival is evidence that a person is unassimilated. 

If Old Wykehamists are unchangeably alien, there is little hope for the rest of us.

The view that remigration is the way to ‘save the West’ is not restricted to the UK or Europe. In October, the US Department of Homeland Security put a single word post, “remigrate”, on X, months after news that the State Department wanted to create an Office of Remigration. Diwali celebrations by FBI director Kash Patel received even more vicious blowback than Sunak or Patel. Anti-migrant actors lionise fellow travellers across borders, using their content to further create a world divided between white civilisation and a great, grey mass of barbarism, superstition and savagery.

We also know that this hate is being monetised thanks to platforms that seem unwilling or incapable of imposing their own terms and conditions on hateful content. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) recently identified a Sri Lankan network that pumped out thousands of anti-migrant posts on Facebook targeting the UK; TBIJ found a similar ecosystem run from Nigeria last year. There are even more esoteric money-making schemes at play: cryptocurrency accounts created and promoted memecoins themed around anti-migrant protests. One such example used an AI-generated video of Elon Musk to try and boost its value. Whether mercenary motives or hate comes first can be hard to tell, but the incentive and the impact is clear.

In the 1970s, a National Front poster featured a nightmarish caricature of a Black face, dripping like ink down a Union Jack. Even without the dire caption “Your last chance…”, the messaging is hard to miss: non-white migration will destroy Britain.

Whether that sentiment entered abeyance or was just more politely masked is difficult to say. But it is clear that ethno-nationalism in Britain is more prominent than it has been in years. To counter it will take more than the ‘easy’ solution of policing and moderation, but a failure to engage with the issue risks a darker, diminished country.

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan is an editorial manager and analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

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