The Boriswave isn’t a myth
KARL WILLIAMS
- The Boriswave has made the failure on immigration more visible. Pretending otherwise will not restore trust in the state
- Social media accounts are exposing the failures of Britain’s visa regime far better than the Civil Service
- Net migration might be slowing, but the population of migrants is much higher than it used to be
Whenever I think about Boris Johnson, the old French proverb ‘après moi le déluge’ comes to mind. It means a blithe, even nihilistic disregard for whatever ruination ensues after one’s own time. For many years, it was thought to have originated with Louis XV or his mistress Madame de Pompadour in the 1750s. It thus assumed a prophetic quality after the French Revolution had – like the biblical flood – swept away the ancien régime.
In fact, as shown by historian Michael Sonenscher, it was already a common maxim well before France’s penultimate pre-Revolutionary king might have used it. It denoted not so much political cataclysm as fiscal recklessness – though the philosophes shared with their Scottish Enlightenment counterparts the fear that the latter would precipitate the former: ‘either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation’, in the words of David Hume.
To tell people in these areas not to believe the evidence of their own eyes, and that there is no problem, seems remarkably unsympathetic
Which brings us nicely back to Boris Johnson – and to the political commentator Sam Freedman. Despite being elected on a manifesto that promised ‘fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down’, Johnson presided over the creation of an immigration system that saw numbers reach record highs and where only around 15% of arrivals actually held work visas. This surge in immigration – which has come to be known as the ‘Boriswave’ – helped sweep away the Tories in the 2024 general election.
Yet a few days ago, Freedman published an essay on ‘The myth of the “Boriswave’. He argued that the term is a dangerous (albeit ‘inspired’) bit of online-right propaganda guilty of three things: distracting from the fact that net migration is now falling; over-simplifying a complex migration phenomenon; and misrepresenting the fiscal profile of post-2020 migration as negative rather than positive. The result, Freedman contends, is policy change to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and even citizenship requirements being driven by a ‘largely invented problem’.
But let us at least take a look at some of the raw figures behind this ‘largely invented problem’:
- In 2021-25, 5.6 million people arrived in Britain and net migration came in at 2.7 million – equivalent to the combined populations of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, and population growth of about 4%
- Annual net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year to March 2023, at almost four times the (already historically very high) average level of the 2010s (241,000)
- In each of 2022, 2023 and 2024, the population increased in absolute terms by more than any other year on record, with immigration driving 99% of this increase
- 2023 saw the fastest rate of population growth since 1828, during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution
- Once you account for the net outflow of 500,000 British nationals, net migration of non-UK citizens was 3.2 million people – equal to about 4.8% of the pre-Boriswave population
- Almost 1 in every 20 people living in Britain by the end of 2025 had arrived in just the last five years
- By mid-2024, the foreign-born share of the population was 18.9% – higher than the ‘melting pot’ of America – and by the end of 2025, it was probably 19.9% (versus 16.0% at the census)
- Around 1 in every 5 people living in Britain today was born overseas, up from around 1 in 12 at the turn of the century
Needless to say, this has massive implications for housing, infrastructure and public services. As I pointed out in the Centre for Policy Studies paper ‘A Migration Revolution’, at least in terms of pure magnitude, the post-2020 migration wave has some claim to be the single most significant demographic event in modern British history (using population data collated by the Bank of England going back to 1701). Some invention, indeed.
However, Freedman is relatively sanguine. Net migration, he reminds us, is ‘now plummeting towards zero’ (provisional estimates put it at 171,000 in 2025). International students are leaving in large numbers and tighter Immigration Rules since 2024 (on student dependants and skilled worker salary thresholds, for example) have reduced the inflow. If legal migration is most of the way towards being fixed, then this is a problem for the right – or at least it will be once the voters catch up. Hence repeated referrals to the now largely historical Boriswave ‘as a way of keeping immigration at the top of the news agenda’.
I think Freedman is arguing in good faith. But I also think he misunderstands both the nature of voters’ disquiet and the arguments being made by the right, offline and online. In a media landscape shaped by headlines on small boat crossings and ONS net migration data releases, it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing on flows and forgetting about stocks.
I’ve previously drawn an analogy with inflation. Politicians like to boast about inflation coming down, but often this just irks voters. Prices are still rising – only at a slower rate than before – and things are still less affordable than in recent memory. Similarly, net migration might be slowing, but the population of migrants is much higher than it used to be.
Most voters don’t pay much attention to immigration data and are quite bad at quantifying flows – one poll found that people thought net migration was 70,000 when the official data had it at over 700,000. But people do register and intuit the changes they see around them in day-to-day life. They don’t have to know the exact percentage increase in the price of a kWh of electricity or a pint of milk to know prices are significantly higher than five years ago. Ditto with the migrant population and the changes they see around them such as the explosion in Turkish barber shops and other symptoms of high street decay that both Reform UK and Labour have been talking about recently.
Some localities have undergone especially enormous demographic churn and change in the last few years, which many people find disorienting. In Nottingham for example, the population rose by 2,943 from mid-2020 to mid-2025 but net international migration of 36,416 people accounted for 1,237% of the net population increase, more than offsetting deaths and internal migration. There are another 90 local authorities in England and Wales with significant population growth where net international migration accounted for at least 100% of the increase over this period, including Norwich (607%), Gwynedd (239%), Eastbourne (196%) and Worcester (186%). This is ONS data, not an invention of the online right.
To tell people in these areas not to believe the evidence of their own eyes, and that there is no problem, seems remarkably unsympathetic. Another (apocryphal) 18th-century quote comes to mind: ‘Let them eat cake’.
Freedman is also relaxed about the 1.6m individuals the Home Office expects to obtain ILR over 2026-2030 (absent any policy change). This is one of the places where his charge of over-simplification comes in: the ‘Boriswave’ concept treats migration as one amorphous lump, whereas different migrants on different visa routes have different characteristics, not least in terms of tax and spend.
But in reality, the right-wing policy community is very aware of these differences. As per the CPS report ‘Taking Back Control’:
Rather than a debate on whether migration is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we should maximise the benefits through a more selective approach.
Indeed, I would say the average policy anon on X has quite a fine-grained appreciation for the different types of immigration since 2020.
For example, in recent months a genre of online posting has emerged based on digging through the register of licensed visa sponsors – which has exploded to over 140,000 sponsors since 2020 – and linking organisations to specific certificates of sponsorship (CoS) for skilled worker visas. The data analysis is often accompanied by pictures of the employers’ premises, from Google Maps or even taken in person. There have been some extraordinary findings: 79 vape shops issuing skilled worker visas, tiny mobile phone shops sponsoring multitudes of sales supervisors and single-premise takeaways sponsoring scores of chefs. The list goes on and on (and that’s without getting into fake care homes and health and care visas).
But perhaps this should not be too surprising. We’ve known for a long time that very many of the skilled workers visas were issued for jobs that would not, in most people’s eyes, count as skilled work, thanks to low salary thresholds and the even lower thresholds on the massively expanded Shortage Occupation List (SOL) from 2021, which Freedman himself nods to (the relaxation in ‘salary and occupation restrictions’).
This is also evident in the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) analysis that Freedman cites. Skilled workers (excluding health and care visa holders) in the top few earnings deciles will be massive lifetime net contributors to the public purse, should they settle, whereas those in the bottom decile are borderline breakeven. But according to another, more recent piece of analysis by the MAC it is those lower earning migrants who are most likely to seek to settle in Britain, especially if they are from poorer countries originally: ‘migrants initially earning less than £40,000 have the highest stay rates compared to migrants on higher salary bands’ and ‘migrants from the highest salary band (earnings over £125,000) exhibit the lowest stay rates, particularly over the long-term’.
This is somewhat at odds with Freedman’s contention that we shouldn’t worry about recent migrants getting ILR as per the projections, since the 306,000 skilled workers and dependants in the Home Office ‘central case’ will be overwhelmingly fiscally positive and likely more than cover any costs associated with dependants, refugees and social carers on health and care visas getting ILR.
The one area where Freedman concedes ILR for Boriswave migrants might be a problem is for social carers on health and care visas. Around 463,000 people on health and care visas are projected to get ILR, most of whom will be minimum wage care workers and their dependants, not doctors and nurses. In fact, Freedman thinks the social carers are the only part of the post-2020 migration surge that Johnson ‘can reasonably be criticised for’.
But this fundamentally misunderstands the incentives in government. The only cabinet minister with incentives to reduce immigration is the Home Secretary. Against lobbying from the Treasury, DHSC, DfE, DEFRA, BIST and so on, their job will be a near impossibility. The one time in 14 years in power when the Tories managed to get numbers down (bar Covid) was when David Cameron backed his Home Secretary, Theresa May, to the hilt in the early 2010s (before transitional controls on Romania and Bulgaria ended, pushing up numbers again).
If we were taking 200,000 migrants from Hong Kong, and a similar number from Ukraine (who are, at the request of the Ukrainian government, not eligible for ILR), then the system should have been tightened elsewhere. It is the Prime Minister who has to decide between trade-offs across different government policy areas, and when it came down to it, Johnson made the decision that as long as you had taken back control of immigration policy, the overall numbers didn’t matter, and so there were no trade-offs. Classic cakeism, in other words. And ultimately, the buck has to stop with the Prime Minister.
In any case, Freedman disputes the notion that the Boriswave will be a fiscal catastrophe and rubbishes Reform’s modelling of it, instead praising the MAC analysis (in the interests of transparency, I should point out that I now have a dog in this fight). This is undeniably a complex area, but his chief criticism of Reform’s modelling is that they provided numbers that did not discount future spending (alongside providing the discounted numbers). But this was exactly the approach taken by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) when it attempted to model migrant fiscal profiles in the 2024 edition of its ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability report’. In many ways, Reform’s model is more sophisticated than the MAC analysis (which informs Reform’s model’s inputs in any case), not least in modelling migrant households, and not just individuals.
However, one thing that Freedman is certainly right about is the potency of the posting-to-policy pipeline – at least as far as the ‘skilled’ worker discourse is concerned. Zia Yusuf, for instance, recently highlighted incongruous skilled work sponsorships at premises in Northolt Road in Harrow. But why this should be the problem Freedman thinks it is, is not obvious. The anon accounts are exposing the failures of Britain’s visa regime, including blatant fraud (and are evidently doing a far better job of it than the Civil Service). Surely we should want our politicians to fix parts of the state that are so manifestly broken.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. The effects of the Boriswave on the solvency of the British state might be heavily disputed. But many commentators, including those on the left like David Goodhart, would accept that the failure of politicians to control and reduce immigration, breaking promise after promise, has been utterly corrosive of trust in politics. It was a precondition for Brexit and the destabilisation of the Westminster party system. And increasingly, downstream of immigration, the legitimacy of the British state itself is being called into question (‘two-tier justice’ and the grooming gangs, for example). Around 46% of voters now think immigration has been ‘mostly bad for the country’ versus just 17% ‘mostly good’, and 70% think it has been too high versus just 4% too low.
The Boriswave has made the failure on immigration more visible than ever. Pretending otherwise or thinking that it is largely a problem invented by populist demagogues will do nothing to restore trust in politics and the state – quite the reverse. But the disconnect between the literati and the British public persists.
If the denizens of Versailles could grasp the threat to the legitimacy of the French regime, why is it that our own cossetted elites cannot recognise the peril to the prevailing political orthodoxy? Perhaps the Boriswave was only the prelude to the true deluge.
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(UKR)