The ‘Boriswave’ and Britain’s Immigration Disaster

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, September 07, 2025

 

Here’s a question.

 

Between Britain and the U.S., which has accepted the most legal immigrants in the last three years for which there are complete records?

 

That I am even asking probably gives the game away.

 

Yes, it’s Britain, a country that, despite frantic and often absurd efforts to rewrite or portray its past, has not historically been a country of mass immigration.

 

Hans van Leeuwen and others, writing in the Daily Telegraph:

 

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.

 

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.

 

The starting point to understand how and why that “Trojan horse” was let in is Brexit. Britons voted to leave the EU but by a narrow majority and without specifying how. That was left to Parliament, and thanks to the failures of leadership of two consecutive Tory prime ministers, Theresa May (who also gave Britain a legally binding “net zero” commitment) and Boris Johnson (another net-zero enthusiast, incidentally), the U.K. pursued a form of Brexit that not only was unnecessarily divisive (and costly) but also paved the way for the Boriswave.

 

Although the Brexit referendum was decided narrowly, polls indicated that, once the vote had been taken, there was a solid majority for a narrow Brexit. This would extricate the country from the EU’s state-building process (“ever closer union”) while retaining a close trading relationship by, say perhaps, remaining a member of European Free Trade Association, within the European Economic Area (the single market) via something akin to the “Norway option.” May and Johnson resisted efforts to go down this route on the grounds that Brexit voters had rejected the EU’s “freedom of movement.” But they did so without thinking through the implications for an economy that, despite worrying levels of structural (if often concealed) unemployment, had become unhealthily dependent on cheap migrant labor.

 

The answer, in theory, was to wean Britain off that model by adopting an approach designed to bring its people back into the workforce (higher wages are good!) while allowing a certain degree of skilled migration, measured by a points system. And that, indeed, was what was adopted during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister, in theory; but, as is very well demonstrated in the Daily Telegraph report (please read the whole thing if you can), short-sightedness, a lack of imagination, institutional failure, and a default pro-immigration bias throughout government stood in the way. As for Johnson, he was overtaken by events and partly misled by poor advice. But, relates Van Leeuwen:

 

Recollections of those privy to the discussions [over a new immigration regime] 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. . . .

 

“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.”

 

When Labour prime minister Keir Starmer describes the Johnson government running an “experiment in open borders, conducted on a country that voted for control,” he is exaggerating, but not by that much. To the Tories’ credit, Johnson’s almost (there was Liz Truss, briefly) immediate successor, Rishi Sunak, tightened controls, if not by enough. For other reasons too, the Boriswave may have crested, but dealing with its consequences will bedevil British politics for years to come.