Do Non-English Rulers Import More Immigrants?
Using genetic distance to predict immigration policy
A common motif in British media is that of the immigrant origin politician claiming to want to crack down on immigration. The newspapers express outrage and bemoan the rise of the new far-right, while natives express cynicism that someone so obviously not of their ethnic stock will do anything to protect their ethnic group’s dwindling grasp over their ancestral homeland. Do the natives in this scenario have a point?
To investigate this, I plotted the genetic coordinates of Prime Ministers and their Home Secretaries, responsible for securing the borders, from 1979 to 2019 based on publicly available information on their ancestries. I then compared the distance between them and English people as a whole using their Global25 genetic coordinates, assuming that the politicians with only English recent ancestors were effectively as English as the population average. I then compared these genetic distances to gross immigration numbers for the UK as a whole, bearing in mind that immigration is overwhelmingly to England.
Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries over 1979-2019 in genetic coordinate space
We would not of course expect a perfectly correlated relationship between genetic distance and immigration numbers. Firstly, it takes time to ease or restrict population flows. Legislation brought in by new governments must pass through deliberations and readings in Parliament before being enacted. Bureaucratic changes also take time, and Sir Humphrey-style civil servants are not famous for rushing to implement new policy. In the British system, much of immigration policy is implemented through the Immigration Rules rather than headline Acts, meaning that changes often arrive quietly, then compound as institutions adapt.
Secondly, the real numbers on the true population of the UK are unknown. We know that the government doesn’t know how many illegal immigrants are in the country, and population statistics are patchy estimates subject to frequent revisions. Nevertheless, for this investigation let’s assume over the observation period that the level of unknown illegal immigration tracks the level of legal immigration, such that annual immigration figures remain informative.
A further complication is that immigration does not behave like a smooth continuous process. It tends to move in steps, as regimes establish new defaults which persist even as individual ministers rotate. A reasonable assumption, therefore, is that a Prime Minister or Home Secretary will continue to affect immigration numbers for some time after taking office. Another is that the relevant question is not simply whether immigration rises or falls in absolute terms, but whether it rises above the baseline established by the recent past. For this reason, alongside simple level comparisons, I also measured whether changes in genetic distance were associated with deviations from a rolling average of immigration over the previous few years, as a way of capturing regime-level shifts rather than short-term noise.
Finally, it is not obvious that genetic distance should operate in a linear fashion. If the mechanism at work is one of group alignment rather than fine-grained biological difference, then the most important distinction may be between leaders who are close to the English reference population and those who are clearly outside it. Once that boundary is crossed, additional distance may matter proportionately less. This possibility can be tested directly in the data, and, as we shall see, it turns out to be a crucial part of the story.
When annual immigration levels are plotted against time, the familiar picture emerges. Immigration rises substantially over the period, but not smoothly. Instead, it advances in steps, settling onto higher plateaus which then persist. This alone suggests that explanations framed purely in terms of short-term economic demand or administrative error are incomplete. Something, or several things, are periodically resetting the baseline.
Overlaying the average full year genetic distance of Prime Ministers onto this series produces a striking alignment. Periods in which the Prime Minister is genetically closer to the English reference tend to coincide with lower immigration levels. This relationship survives basic controls for time, though it would be naïve to treat this alone as decisive evidence.
More revealing is what happens when the focus shifts from absolute levels to changes relative to the recent past. To capture this, I constructed a rolling baseline, defined as the average immigration level over the previous three years, and then measured how much each year deviated from that baseline. This allows us to ask a different question: when immigration rises unusually quickly, overshooting what the system had just been producing, who is in charge?
Here the pattern becomes clearer. Years in which immigration significantly exceeds its recent baseline were more likely to coincide with Prime Ministers who were genetically more distant from the English. This is consistent with the idea that leadership alignment matters most at moments of regime change, when new defaults are being established, rather than during periods of steady-state management.
The role of the Home Secretary is more ambiguous. While Home Secretaries clearly matter operationally, their genetic distance does not show the same stable relationship with immigration outcomes once broader regime context is taken into account. This is not especially surprising. Home Secretaries operate within constraints set by the governing regime, administering a bureaucratic machine with a direction largely having been fixed elsewhere.
The most important refinement to the original hypothesis, however, concerns how genetic distance operates.
Initial intuition might suggest a linear relationship, with each increment of distance producing a proportional change in immigration outcomes. The data over the sample period do not support this. Instead, the relationship appears to behave more like a threshold. The key distinction is between leaders who are near the English reference and those who are clearly outside that range. Once that boundary is crossed, additional distance adds relatively little explanatory power.
Empirically, the threshold which best fits the data lies around a genetic distance of 0.004 in the Global25 space, roughly the distance between the Cornish and English genetic averages. This aligns closely with intuitive distinctions. While David Cameron is just about as foreign to an Englishman as a Cornish person, Jack Straw, for example, sits at roughly the distance one would expect between an Englishman and a Dutchman, while Boris Johnson is about as genetically distant from an Englishman as a baguette-munching Parisian is. The precise numbers are less important than the pattern they reveal.
This threshold behaviour is exactly what one would expect if the mechanism at work is group alignment rather than fine-grained biological difference. In most social contexts, the largest shift occurs when someone is no longer perceived, consciously or unconsciously, as part of the in-group. Beyond that point, further distinctions matter less.
Placing these findings back into historical context strengthens the interpretation.
New Eras
The late 1990s marked a clear political transition. New Labour entered office in 1997, with Tony Blair as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as Chancellor until eventually taking the helm. Both are Scots with varying levels of admixture, and presided over a governing coalition remaining in power for over a decade. During what was contemporarily known as “Scottish Raj” rule, the immigration and asylum system was repeatedly restructured through major Acts, beginning with the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and continuing through the early 2000s. These reforms reshaped the machinery itself, increasing administrative capacity and throughput.
In 2004, a genuine structural break occured with EU enlargement. The UK’s implementation choices determined how this expansion translated into actual population flows, pushing immigration onto a new and higher track. In 2008, the Points Based System was rolled out through changes to the Immigration Rules, further entrenching the new baseline. Throughout this period, Home Secretaries changed, but the overall direction remained consistent.
Then, from 2014 onwards, the focus shifted toward internal enforcement and access to services. This phase was often described as a clampdown, but did not reverse the earlier step changes. By the end of the observation period, Boris Johnson appeared as Prime Minister in 2019. While the “Boris Wave” wasn’t covered in this research, his genetic distance placed him beyond the near-English threshold identified over 1979-2019, and his rule saw both implementation of Brexit and a new pro-mass immigration regime.
Taken together, these results do not prove that genetic distance causes mass immigration. They do not deny the importance of economic conditions, international obligations, or institutional inertia. What they do suggest is that Britain’s immigration system behaves like a regime machine, and that the alignment of those who control it correlates with when and how its baseline shifts.
If this interpretation is correct, then much of the public debate around immigration is misdirected. Focusing on individual ministers, rhetorical promises, or isolated policy announcements misses the deeper mechanism. Systems built deliberately, through legislation, administrative redesign, and rule changes, do not unwind automatically. Changing outcomes requires altering regimes, coalitions, and the assumptions embedded within the state itself.
The question raised at the beginning can now be revisited. When natives express scepticism that leaders who are clearly not of their ethnic stock will act to preserve their ancestral homeland, are they merely indulging prejudice, or are they responding to a real pattern in how power operates?
The evidence presented here suggests that their intuition is grounded in something observable.