Joanna Lumley, the iconic star of Absolutely Fabulous, shares her thoughts on the migrant crisis, urging a shift in focus to the root causes of migration.

Joanna Lumley has given her opinion on the current migrant crisis (Image: Getty)

Absolutely Fabulous legend Joanna Lumley has given her opinion on the current migrant crisis saying a country like the UK cannot support unlimited migration. She insisited more needs to be done to improve stability and opportunities in developing countries while explaining crisis such as a lack of food, infrastructure and warfare is the driving force behind a lot of world migration. Calling for the debate around the issue to be re-focused she said: “I think we have stopped looking at what the problems are when there are these great shifts of people,” she said.

“Most people would much rather remain in their own homeland. We all have a great protection feeling to our own homeland. The reason they move is that either it cannot yield enough food for them to live on, or the warfare is such that they’re in danger of their lives, or they want a better life,” she said.

Joanna Lumley says the debate about immigration needs to be re-focused (Image: Getty)

“How are we in the world going to spread this back again so you can stay in your fabulous country,” she asked.

“You can grow crops, you can have factories and things like this, you can have schools and hospitals, everything can work here, but it must have been made safe and stable and functioning.

“You don’t get to that stage by putting up fences. You do something else. I’m not sure how it is, because the world is not thinking, always thinking keep them out, stop that, stop that, stop that.

“There’s a lovely sentence which I read over in a bookshop in Paris, it comes from the Bible, ‘And the Lord said be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise’.

Tens of thousands of migrants have arrived in the UK since Labour took power (Image: Getty)

“We’ve just got to be so careful about this because everybody’s frantic about numbers,” she acknowledged. “Of course, a tiny country can’t support millions and millions of people, but we’ve got to start thinking outwards a bit more,” she said.

Her remarks come as recent official figures show 57,643 people have come to the UK by small boats since Labour took power in July last year.

The 10,000 mark of illegal migrants crossing the Channel was reached before the end of April, more than a month earlier than the year before.

In September 2025 a single dinghy brought 125 migrants to Britain – the largest number a small boat has carried across the Channel.

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