Just eight months ago Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office published a document called, ‘A Fairer Pathway To Settlement’ which described the Boriswave as an ‘extraordinary open border experiment’, in which an additional 2.6 million people moved to this country between 2021 and 2024.
Many of these arrived under the health and care visa. This was a disastrous policy – as the Home Office pointed out at the time, in an ‘attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs’ in the care sector, we imported ‘616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024’. Even worse, over ‘half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were’. The Home Office added that ‘fraud… was rife’.
Those people who arrived during the Borswave are generally low-paid and older, meaning they have fewer working years ahead of them. Under the current rules they are allowed to ‘settle’, gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) after being in the country for five years. Once a migrant is granted ILR, they can access benefits, are eligible for social housing and any children they have are automatically British citizens. They can also sponsor more family members to join them in the UK. Just a year after being granted ILR, they can apply for British citizenship.
We already know how much the ‘family member’ route has been abused. According to reporting in the Times, some ‘migrant workers are…bringing in family members at a ratio as high as 15 for every worker’, although when I spoke to the Home Office they told me that ‘it is inaccurate to link dependant visas granted in a given year with worker visas granted in the same period. Many of those dependants may be joining workers who arrived in the UK several years earlier’.
Either way, vast numbers of ‘family members’ are flooding into the UK. Under the current rules, after five years they too will be allowed to settle, with almost no conditions at all.
As the Home Secretary wrote last year:
‘Today, settlement is near automatic. The only qualifications required are to have lived in this country for, in most cases, five years, and to have not received a prison sentence of over a year’.
So, in order to avert a fiscal disaster, which would cost British taxpayers hundreds of billions of pounds, the Home Secretary set out new plans in which the minimum period before settlement would be increased, and settlement itself would require conditions such as the migrant having ‘a clean criminal record’, being able to ‘speak English to a high standard’ and having made ‘a sustained and measurable economic contribution’.
The effect of these changes, combined with the ending of the health and care visa route, would have been to prevent very many Boriswavers from settling, and indeed many would simply have had to return home upon the expiry of their visa. This would have been a measured, kind and effective way of reversing the Boriswave.
Unfortunately it seems it is the Home Secretary who is reversing. According to reports, these changes may well be scrapped, and the Boriswave allowed to settle after five years. This follows a letter signed by nearly 80 Labour MPs last week complaining that it wasn’t fair to change rules retrospectively. There seems to be no concern, of course, for what is fair to British taxpayers. The reversal is being billed as a ‘compromise’, because migrants granted ILR will have to wait another ‘three or four years’ to claim benefits. This entirely misses the point, as all such a change would do is delay the fiscal disaster until after the election – the Boriswave would likely still be vastly costly for the rest of their lives.
I spoke to Chris Philp the shadow home secretary, who said: ‘It is concerning that Shabana Mahmood seems to be capitulating to open-borders Labour MPs to save Andy Burnham from an early commons rebellion. 1,750 people are being granted ILR every week, meaning 65,000 grants since the home secretary announced this policy. This is a grave mistake. Only those making a significant economic contribution over a ten year period should be allowed to stay permanently. Those not working, or working in low skilled jobs, should be required to go home at the end of their temporary work visa.’
I would go further. The Boriswave was a huge mistake. It is stupid and ridiculous that we should be compelled to bankrupt the country because Labour MPs care more about seeming nice than serving their nation’s interests. If Andy Burnham is already so weak that he can’t stand up to his MPs, then he’s going to be an even worse prime minister than Starmer was.
Whatever Labour do, the Boriswave will have to be reversed. The next government will have no other choice. And if that means cancellations of settlement, and even of acquired citizenships, then so be it. We should be honest about this – it’s time for Reform and the Tories to announce that they will reverse the Boriswave, whatever it takes.
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