Reference: FOI-2024-2201
You asked
I would like to submit a freedom of information request regarding immigration into this country including legal and illegal migration.
Could you please confirm the total number of immigrants into this country [UK as a whole] (both legal and illegal) and what percentage of these people either identified as muslim (including all variant sects) or came from a predominantly Muslim country per year for the following years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 (so far if you have the data).
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request regarding migration.
The data that you are asking for is not held.
For long-term international migration estimates, please see our latest release. You can see part of your question answered in the main data table. Table 1 in the underlying data sheet contains overall immigration, emigration and net migration levels. Table 3 contains these data, broken down by the top 10 nationalities, by overall reason (work study, other), from year ending December 2019 to year ending December 2023. Religion is not recorded in our sources used for measuring Long-term international migration, so we cannot break this down further to answer your question.
For 2021, we can provide census data on religion, country of birth, passports held, and year of arrival.
The 'Create a custom dataset' tool can be used to provide data for England and Wales for some or a combination of all of these variables.
You can either use the Country of birth (UK), religion and year of arrival in the UK, dataset provided above, or you can add the Passports Held data to these variables and download that data using this link.
For comparison with the total usual resident population of England and Wales, you can use the topic summary datasets available here:
- TS008 - Sex (for the total population)
Variables used in custom datasets:
Our census data is for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland carry out their own census, their contact details are provided below.
Northern Ireland's census was held in 2021 and you can access their census data here: https://www.nisra.gov.uk/statistics/2021-census/results.
Scotland's census was moved to 2022. Publication of unrounded estimates began in May 2024. Please see their website for information: https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/about/2022-census/census-outputs-schedule/.
Contact details for NRS and NISRA are provided below:
National Records Of Scotland
Tel: 0131 3144299
Email: statisticscustomerservices@nrscotland.gov.uk
Website: www.nrscotland.gov.uk
Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
Tel: 02890 255156
Email: census@nisra.gov.uk
Website: http://www.nisra.gov.uk/census
Please get back in touch if you require anything further.