Thought i'd share this well researched article on immigration written by the Telegraph that breaks down what policies were carried out. Brexit and Boris changed immigration, and the Australian points system was adapted as a system to allow any Gov department to make a case to loosen immigration and got us to where we are today.
https://apple.news/A5hHobNEaREOiWB-jtnOCGw
How Boris opened the door to the biggest wave of migrants in history
As Vote Leave’s figurehead, the would-be Tory leader called for a crackdown. As PM he rolled out the red carpet
By the end of 2016, Boris Johnson had led the Leavers to victory in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump had won the US presidential election. Both campaigns were built on the claim that immigration had spun out of control.
But while Brexit and Maga had similar diagnoses of the problem, their solutions were radically different. Over the following four years, Trump began building a border wall with Mexico. Meanwhile in Britain, the Conservative Party built a points-based immigration system.
Experts differ on whether Trump’s border wall has prevented much illegal migration into the US. But Johnson’s supposedly points-based system has had a stunning effect on legal migration to the UK: it has rocketed.
In each of the past three years for which records are available, more people migrated to Britain than to America – a country that is 40 times larger by area than the UK, and has almost five times the population.
About 1.3 million new arrivals flocked to Britain in 2023, compared with 1.2 million alighting in the storied American “nation of immigrants”. UK arrivals also topped the US in 2021 and 2022, and last year it probably happened again.
That 1.3 million figure is the UK’s highest legal migration total in a single year in records that go back 60 years. Subtracting those who have left Britain, net migration has added 2.6 million people in the four years since Johnson launched his “Australian-style” points-based system. That amounts to 4pc of the UK’s estimated population of 69 million.
“Net migration has risen very sharply, to levels never seen,” says Prof Alan Manning, of the London School of Economics, a former chairman of the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC). “I think you might have to go back 150, 200 years to find population growth quite that fast outside of wartime.”
The so-called “Boriswave” has washed through British society, unleashing policy challenges and political passions that most in Westminster are only just starting to comprehend.
For the first time since Brexit, voters are once again naming immigration as the issue that worries them most.
The boats on the Channel and the migrant hotels in the suburbs dominate the headlines. But it is legal migration, coming through the front gate of the points-based system, that people see as a Trojan horse.
“Damaging though illegal migration is, legal migration is even more harmful to the country because of the sheer eye-watering numbers of people who have been coming across in recent years perfectly legally. It’s putting immense pressure on public services,” Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, told The Spectator this week.
Jenrick calls the points-based system “the worst policy mistake of my lifetime”.
Even Sir Keir Starmer’s rhetoric steps up a notch when the topic turns to immigration. He has described the Johnson government’s post-Brexit immigration regime as an “experiment in open borders, conducted on a country that voted for control”.
Johnson said Brexit was the door to “take back control” of immigration, and promised that an Australian-style points system was the key.
But Madeleine Sumption, the director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, says: “They took back control. And then they didn’t exercise it.”
How did they lose their grip? Some, like Jenrick, say the system Johnson and his ministers designed was flawed. Others say a myopic and incompetent Home Office let Johnson down. Another school of thought is that Johnson was mostly mugged by circumstance.
The most damaging accusation is that he and his ministers knew what they were doing, and what the consequences would be. They consciously opted to ramp up net migration for economic reasons, betting they could wear the cost to their party and their country.
Which story is right? This is politics – so the answer, it turns out, is all of the above.
Cabinet arm-wrestling
After the Brexit referendum, the Conservative Party gave Theresa May the job of steering Britain out of the EU. She arrived in Downing Street from six long years as home secretary, with firm views on immigration.
Her successor as home secretary, Amber Rudd, remembers May telling her that whatever the new immigration system looked like, it would need to reduce the number of migrants because that’s what people had voted for.
“We all nodded along. But afterwards I had four or five of my colleagues come up to me and tell me that their department was going to need an exemption,” she says.
While Rudd didn’t name names, it’s not hard to guess where exemptions might be sought. Construction workers for the housing secretary’s building targets. Seasonal farmhands for the environment secretary. Doctors and nurses for the health secretary. Teachers and postgrads for the education secretary. And the business secretary would probably have been fielding calls from companies looking to protect their access to offshore talent.
“The Home Office is generally against liberalisation and in favour of immigration restrictions. But every other department in government is pro-liberalisation,” says one department source.
“If you want to put a restriction in and you’re arguing with the Treasury or the Foreign Office, you need the PM to come down on your side. Often they don’t.”
May, the first post-Brexit referendum PM, was a creature of the Home Office and was said to be sceptical about the points-based system. In Australia, the regime typically delivers lots of skilled immigration, even extending to would-be migrants without a firm job offer. This wasn’t what she had in mind.
It wasn’t until Johnson seized the premiership in late 2019 that momentum for an Australian-style points system began to build.
In the end, only parts of the system used points, and not exactly according to the Australian playbook. The real debate was, once again, between departments or ministers looking to protect their turf.
Everyone had plundered the freely available labour from the EU but now that each migrant would need a visa, there was a vigorous debate as to how wide the entry gate should be.
Johnson and a core group of ministers thrashed out the scheme at meetings of the Brexit-X Committee, which included chancellor Sajid Javid, home secretary Priti Patel, business secretary Andrea Leadsom, cabinet minister Michael Gove and foreign secretary Dominic Raab. Johnson’s key adviser, Dominic Cummings, would also attend.
‘Everybody was freaking out’
Recollections of those privy to the discussions say Johnson came down on the side of keeping the gate wide open.
“He is very relaxed about migration. He was mayor of London, one of the world’s most diverse cities. He likes that cultural mix,” one of his erstwhile cabinet colleagues says.
His inclination was buttressed by warnings that if migration was suppressed, a labour shortage would drive up wages, spurring inflation and higher interest rates.
Matt Hancock, then the health secretary, is understood to have told him that if it became too hard to recruit staff from overseas, the NHS’s wage bill could surge by £3bn.
Speaking to a Sun newspaper podcast last year, Johnson said he was forced to keep migration policy loose to ensure there were enough workers to “stack the shelves and fill the petrol stations with petrol”.
“Everybody was freaking out. Every business and every department of state was saying we need more pairs of hands to get things done,” he said.
The voice of caution would usually be the home secretary. But Patel backed her boss – both then and now.
“Are we now saying that those NHS workers who came here during the pandemic were not welcome and we should be sending them back?” she said last year. “That is certainly not the Conservative Party that I represent.”
As Johnson sees it, he built a visa-issuing machine that could, in theory, have its dials set to curbing migration. But wittingly or otherwise, he programmed it to deliver the opposite result.
“The normal dynamic within government is that you would have some government departments lobbying the whole time to liberalise the rules, and the Home Office pushing back on this,” Manning says.
“What seems to have happened in that period is that the lobby groups were given everything they wanted.”
The government took four fateful decisions which, taken together, unshackled migrant numbers and composition in ways nobody seems to have anticipated.
Lowering skills bar
Johnson’s worry about shelf-stackers and petrol-pumpers led to the government’s Australian-style system awarding points not just to people with a university education, but also those with only A-Level-equivalent qualifications. The minimum salary that would attract points was also dropped to just £25,600.
The number of visas issued to lower-skilled workers, mostly in food preparation and hospitality, almost doubled between 2022 and 2023. The number of skilled tradespeople migrating to the UK has also more than doubled since 2021.
Meanwhile at the upper end, visas for highly skilled engineers, scientists and tech workers slumped by two thirds in that time, and the inflow of corporate managers and directors dropped by 40pc.
Overall, the proportion of skilled-work visas issued for occupations requiring no more than a school-leaving certificate rose from under 10pc in 2021 to almost 60pc at the start of last year.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the redesigned system, though, is that it has changed where Britain’s migrants come from.
Before Brexit, most people from outside the EU could only get to Britain if they were highly skilled. The EU was an easier source of supply for tradesmen and low-skilled workers.
“Employers can’t now go and get people from Europe to do it. So we thought perhaps we should allow people from around the world to come and do those jobs. That was a liberalisation of the rules,” says Brian Bell, the chairman of MAC.
Post-Brexit, the biggest suppliers of foreign workers are now from the developing world: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Philippines and Zimbabwe.
Australia and the US have dropped out of the top five source countries since 2019, and no European country has been in the top 10 since Johnson’s system was introduced.
Solving social care shortages
The labour shortage was particularly acute in one sector: social care, which was knocked for six by the pandemic.
Care home bosses, unable to offer hybrid work and nine-to-five hours, found that even raising salaries, or offering training and perks such as healthcare, could not lure workers.
“Basically, it was impossible to find enough [workers]. Everybody was competing for everybody. We really, really struggled,” says Paul de Savary. He employs around 550 staff across 11 care homes and two supported living services in Lincolnshire, looking after adults with the most complex needs.
He turned to far-flung places such as the Philippines and Africa to protect his business and his clients from “disaster”.
“We would have ended up having to shut down some of our services, emptying some beds, because we operate with very high staffing levels and high managed risk,” he says.
De Savary was able to keep his operations ticking over thanks to what was perhaps the most fateful of the Johnson government’s four big decisions: to offer a red-carpet visa to people willing to work in social care that meant their families could come too.
The Home Office had estimated that no more than 40,000 people would take up the offer. At first, they appeared to be right, with 37,000 Health & Care visas issued in 2022.
But by the following year that total had ballooned to 105,000, with at least the same number again in visas for spouses and children.
“It was very attractive, because the government was saying, ‘If you come here, you can bring your partner, you can bring dependants with you. After five years, you’ll be able to apply for settlement and stay permanently,’” Bell says.
“You’re offering that disproportionately to poorer countries, where that represents a life-changing opportunity.”
The independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, has been heavily critical of the Home Office’s failure to anticipate the volume of applicants, or deal with the abuse and exploitation that mushroomed in and around the system.
“What worries me most is that the Home Office does not appear to have any process to identify the lessons from this debacle,” he wrote in a March 2024 report on migration in the social care sector.
Sources in the Home Office admit he was right on this. “The Home Office consistently underestimates demand for visas, and has no warning system for when one of its predictions isn’t panning out,” one says.
“The health and care worker visa has created a massive long-term cost, because so many of the people that came in on that visa and their dependants are going to be a burden on the taxpayer. We should have just paid domestic care workers more. It was short-termism of the highest order.”
University challenge
A less burdensome group of migrants, Johnson hoped, would be foreign students, whose fees would boost universities’ balance sheets. His target was to lure 600,000 a year to the UK by 2030.
The government created a visa route allowing students coming even just for a one-year master’s degree to stay on and work for two years after graduating, accompanied by their spouses and children.
“They were offering, in some sense, a package to a couple that said, ‘Pay one year of fees at a university to do a master’s degree, and you get almost six years of time in the UK, between you, working’,” Bell says.
“Even at the minimum wage, that’s a pretty good deal. Particularly if you’re from a country that’s significantly less developed than us: that money, when you take it back, can obviously open up lots of real opportunities for you.”
Numbers shot up to a peak of 498,000, with a disproportionate figure doing master’s degrees at lower-ranked universities. The number of accompanying dependents climbed from 16,000 in 2019 to 143,000 in 2023. More than half of the graduate students arriving in 2020 were still in Britain three years later – a record.
Both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer’s governments have been unwinding this visa, removing the right to bring dependants and now shortening the post-study working period to 18 months.
Opening arms to Ukraine
If the student and social care visas had consequences the government could have foreseen, there were also two huge bursts of immigration that nobody saw coming. Johnson decided to let in 300,000 Ukrainians fleeing from the war to Britain, and 220,000 people abandoning an increasingly undemocratic Hong Kong.
“These were popular policies. So there’s maybe a bit of bad luck that these two things came along at the same time,” Manning says.
There seems to have been less political blowback or social upheaval here. According to a survey carried out in 2023, about two thirds of the Hong Kongers are university-educated and most are of working age. Many, though, complain of having had to take lower-skilled jobs.
Meanwhile, about 70pc of the largely female Ukrainian refugee population have a job, according to an Office for National Statistics survey in April last year, compared with 78pc of the British-born population. About two thirds of Ukrainians said they planned to stay in the UK even if it became safe to return to Ukraine.
A question of control
Experts debate whether immigration benefits the health system on balance, by staffing the hospitals and clinics, or harms it, by overstretching demand. The public view is clearer: 70pc of Britons surveyed by Ipsos believe migration puts extra pressure on the NHS.
There are similar worries, and plenty of anecdotal evidence, that migrants can put strain on the ever-tightening supply of school places and affordable houses. But there is a mysterious dearth of recent official data or insight that might turn correlation into causation.
Data or not, voters now view immigration as the most pressing issue facing the country. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, has seen his party surge in the polls while promising to copy a very different Australian border policy: mass deportations.
Many observers paint Johnson as a victim of circumstance, though most admit he lacked foresight.
“They took liberal choices, and they did not anticipate how many people would take up those opportunities. The outcome was genuinely unexpected, and I think that if they had known, they would have done it differently,” says Sumption at the Oxford Migration Observatory.
Those who worked with Johnson are not so sure. “It didn’t happen by accident. It happened by design,” says a former cabinet colleague. “Boris knew the numbers would be high, although he probably didn’t think they’d be that high.”
Experts suggest the Boriswave may have run its course. The Ukrainian and Hong Kong surges are spent. Policy changes mean dependants will be kept out. And as the Government tightens up the system, more people will run out of road on their visas and will have to leave.
“Just as net migration went up really sharply, it can also fall quite sharply,” Manning says.
Ian Robinson, an immigration adviser and partner at Vialto, says it has become far harder to get a UK work visa or sponsor a worker.
“The salaries are higher, the cost has increased substantially – and continues to increase. The ability for people to stay is also getting harder,” he says. Companies who need workers from overseas are finding “some degree of inconvenience, but it’s not insurmountable”.
Bell reckons that with the Labour Government’s recent proposed changes – closing the social care visa route, shortening the post-study work period for students, raising the quality bar for skilled migrants – net migration could ease closer to the long-term average of about 250,000 a year.
“We might be getting down to not far away from where we used to be. It then becomes a political question: is that roughly right, is that acceptable, in a political sense, or do you want to go lower?” he says.
“If you want to go much lower than that, especially if you want to go to zero, for example, you’d have to make very dramatic decisions.”
Jenrick wants to shift to net emigration. “The age of being open to the world and his wife, who are low-wage, low-skilled individuals, and their dependants has to come to an end,” he says.
Manning reckons Johnson’s system is “basically sound”, and can be adjusted to be more or less restrictive. The priority now, he says, is to find a course and stick to it.
“This sort of boom-bust cycle that the UK went through is a bad idea. Foot on the accelerator, then panic, slam on the brakes. That doesn’t actually help anybody,” he says.
“Ultimately, business and universities, they want stability. They want to know what the system is going to be in two, three years’ time.”
Stability may be alluring but delivering it has proved all but impossible for successive governments.
Rob McNeil, the Migration Observatory’s deputy director, says: “The fundamental question here is that of control, and why it has proved impossible for successive governments to deliver it.” |  |
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