The U.K. Tried to Clamp Down on Migration—and Wound Up With an Unprecedented Wave | World News

Now Farage is back—and Reform UK is currently leading in the polls—largely thanks to an unexpected twist: After Brexit, the U.K. government of then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson embarked on a new migration experiment. It slammed the door on European immigration only to open it to the rest of the world. The idea was to goose a sluggish economy by attracting the planet’s best and brightest people.

The Tories, despite repeatedly promising lower overall immigration levels, soon lost control of the system they designed, triggering the biggest influx of legal migration the country has ever seen. In just one job field, care aides who look after the infirm or elderly, one government forecast assumed some 6,000 migrants a year would come to work. In the space of four years, 679,900 carers and their families arrived, government figures show.

In total, 4.5 million people arrived in Britain between 2021 and 2024, primarily from India, Nigeria and China. One in every 25 people living in the U.K. today came during that four-year window.

In comparison, the U.S. typically averages about one million new lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, a year—to a country with a total population five times the size of Britain’s.

The vast majority of the British entries were legal. But they coincided with a spike in illegal migration, as tens of thousands of asylum seekers also entered Britain every year, with many sailing from France on flimsy dinghies, a powerful image of how the country, despite Brexit, still struggles to control its borders.

While the U.S. has long grappled with illegal immigration, the experience of Britain shows that governments can also struggle to manage legal migration. It also raises questions about the extent to which immigration is an unalloyed economic benefit, even for countries with aging populations that often need workers. Many of the workers who arrived came with dependents and are working in low-wage jobs—far from the engineers and doctors envisaged under the scheme.

This sudden demographic shift, which has come at a time of economic stagnation and piled pressure on Britain’s stretched public services, is roiling the country’s politics. Immigration is now voters’ top concern. Reform UK, which says it would freeze most migration and deport those who arrive illegally, got the most votes of any party in recent municipal elections. The Tories, having lost power last year to the Labour Party, are now a distant third in the polls.

The 61-year-old Farage, long dismissed in Westminster as influential but unelectable, is now being taken seriously as a possible prime minister, though national elections are unlikely before 2029.

“The sense of betrayal is enormous,” Farage said in an interview last month from his party’s new sprawling offices in a high-rise that overlooks central London. Asked why immigration surged after Brexit, Farage paused. “I’ll quote Donald Trump, yeah?” he said, putting on an accent to imitate the American president: “Bah-ris got elected as a conservative and governed as a liberal.”

Voter backlash

Brexit was approved by referendum in 2016 and implemented in 2020. Johnson unveiled a new immigration policy shortly after that he said put “people before passports.” Europeans were no longer able to work visa free in the U.K., and a cap on the numbers of non-EU migrants was scrapped.

In its place was a system that allowed companies to sponsor visas to hire an unlimited number of foreign workers, many of whom were permitted to bring family members with them. While workers had to be “skilled,” the definition was very broad, from roofers to business executives. And some industries were permitted to hire foreign workers on wages below market rates in Britain.

The current Labour government, which defeated the Conservatives in elections last year, has tightened restrictions on visas to bring migration down. “The experiment is over,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in May, saying it had damaged the U.K. economy.

But legal immigration is still running at a pace of just under half a million a year, nearly twice the pre-Brexit average. Illegal boat crossings are also on a record pace so far this year.

Given the U.K.’s reliance on importing foreign workers to undertake low-paid work, especially in its state-run healthcare system, it isn’t clear that the government will be able to cut migration to levels that voters will find acceptable, said Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. “It is easier to increase immigration than reduce it,” she said.

Canada also looked to juice its economy and offset its aging population by allowing in record numbers of legal migrants, boosting its population growth to the highest rate among rich nations. It, too, has tightened visa restrictions as public opinion soured amid a housing shortage. To a lesser degree, Australia went down the same path and is also back-pedalling.

In Britain the situation became particularly toxic because the government repeatedly claimed that it was going to cut immigration, all while letting ever more people into the country. In recent years, annual immigration has equaled the population of cities such as Manchester and Liverpool—in a country struggling to build enough housing and other infrastructure and where more than seven million are on waiting lists for routine healthcare.

The voter backlash is being felt in places like Grantham, a neatly kept redbrick market town in central England that is also the birthplace of Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister and a Conservative icon.

In July 2024, Mike Rudkin, a former meteorologist, stood as a parliamentary candidate in Grantham for Farage’s Reform UK during a general election. Pollsters thought the 58-year-old, who has no background in politics, might collect a few percentage points of the vote. He got 20% and came in third place. A recent poll shows Reform now has an 86% chance of winning the district outright if a vote were held now. Immigration “is a very important topic,” Rudkin said in an interview at a hotel bar. “The doors were really flung open.”

One recently converted Reform supporter is Michael Groves, a 60-year-old originally from South Africa who is a lifelong Tory voter and runs a wellness business in an unusual location: Thatcher’s childhood home.

Sitting in a cramped attic room just next to what was once her bedroom, Groves said both the Tories and Labour have long dismissed qualms about immigration from voters as representative of a “Little Englander” mentality at best, racism at worst. “Who stands up for the person who says immigration is bad for me?”

The local Tory lawmaker, Gareth Davies, a former government minister, said he understands why locals feel aggrieved by the issue. “We as a party could have done more about this, for sure,” he said. “Now, under new leadership, we’re reflecting on that.”

Recruiting abroad

For most of its recent history, Britain was a country of net emigration as people left to forge new lives across its vast empire. In the 1990s, it became a net importer of migrants, especially later as the EU expanded to Eastern Europe. Successive governments promised to reduce the inflow, but said there was little they could do to halt EU citizens’ automatic right to settle in the U.K.

After Brexit, that automatic right to settle was halted. Instead, Johnson touted a migration system that he said would reduce low-skilled immigration to the U.K., bringing overall migration down, while still attracting top scientists and tech entrepreneurs.

But cutting off the flow of low-cost European labor brought teething pains, which were exacerbated by a worker shortage after the pandemic.

Businesses such as agriculture relied on cheap labor, and so did heavyweight government departments such as the National Health Service. Hiring foreign labor was less expensive at a time when Britain’s public spending had soared after the pandemic, and the tax burden was at a postwar high.

Officials at the U.K. Treasury were also nervous that U.K. borrowing costs would rise if there wasn’t economic growth, former officials said, and pushed against tightening immigration too much. The easiest way to boost nominal economic growth is to import population growth.

After fierce lobbying, the result was a relatively liberal migration system. Employers no longer had to try to hire workers from Britain before recruiting from abroad. To acquire a skilled-worker visa, foreign workers weren’t required to have a college degree, they just had to be offered a job with a minimum salary of £25,600, which at the time was 23% below the full-time U.K. median salary.

There were also carve-outs. Firms could sponsor visas in certain sectors, such as construction, where there was an acute shortage of workers, paying them as little as £20,400 a year. And students could come with their families for a one-year master’s course, and stay on for two years after completing their studies.

Net migration from the EU went into reverse, and arrivals from elsewhere surged. In 2021, 93,000 people arrived from India. By 2024, that number was 240,000. The number of Nigerian migrants increased fivefold in the same period.

Many arrived with families in tow. In the 12 months ending March 2024, nearly half of all visas were issued to dependents, not workers.

Politicians touted that the overall economy was growing, even if slightly. But things didn’t feel better for the average Brit. That’s because per capita GDP was growing only an average 0.3% a year in the 2020s, compared with 1.3% a year in the previous decade, according to the national statistics agency, the ONS.

Aides for the elderly

A good example of what went wrong is Britain’s state-funded care system, which pays aides an average $16 an hour to help the infirm or elderly in their homes or in care facilities. As Britain’s population ages, local governments are struggling to pay for rising care costs. Many British people don’t want the jobs at the low level of pay, so the sector relies on low-cost imported labor.

After heavy lobbying from care agencies, the government in 2022 allowed care companies to sponsor visas for foreign workers on an annual salary of around £20,400. Hundreds of thousands arrived.

There was also fraud and abuse. One care company that had no track record and just four employees was granted 1,234 certificates to hire people from abroad as care workers. More than a quarter of care workers who came from abroad were sponsored by companies who later had their license to sponsor visas revoked, according to the government.

One of those who arrived was Stanley Muhindo, a trained nurse from Uganda. Muhindo said he borrowed £23,000 to pay a lawyer and a British-based care company called ILS24 Healthcare to get his visa sponsored. When the 42-year-old arrived in Leeds, in northern England, ILS24 offered him just a few hours of work a week. Unable to pay his debts, he complained to ILS24 and was warned that his visa could be revoked if he blew the whistle.

“They didn’t have clients, they didn’t have hours,” he said. “There was no money.” Last year, he returned to Uganda, where he now works as a farmer.

ILS24 didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Others are stuck. One mother of three from South Africa, who came to work as a carer in Britain three years ago, said she is made to work double shifts from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. most days of the week, helping to dress, feed and bathe elderly people. The work is so intense she takes painkillers to dull the aches in her joints. When she complains about her hours, her employer threatens to revoke her visa. She can’t find another care company that will sponsor her, and her visa doesn’t allow working in another type of job. “I am stranded,” she said.

There are now about 40,000 migrant care workers currently in Britain brought to work at jobs that don’t exist or no longer have sponsors, according to the government.

In 2024, the government tightened entry requirements to prevent care workers from bringing dependents, and last month, healthcare companies were barred by the government from hiring abroad. Care England, a lobby group for the care industry, said the ban will likely exacerbate an existing worker shortage. Currently, 8% of care jobs advertised in Britain remain vacant, it said.

Students who stay

The Conservative government also loosened restrictions on student visas, hoping to bring in the world’s best and brightest.

Before the pandemic, there were around a quarter of a million visas issued each year for foreign students, with around six family members arriving with every 100 students. That surged to 457,000 student visas in 2023, with 30 family members arriving for every 100 students.

The influx was facilitated by British universities, which have caps on what they can charge domestic students and recruit foreign students, who pay much larger fees, to bolster their bottom lines.

While some students went to well-known universities such as Oxford or Cambridge, the number of students undertaking one-year master’s degrees from lesser known British universities shot up. And unlike pre-Brexit, many more stayed on in the U.K. after graduating.

The fruits of that recruitment drive are visible today. In east London sit two modern high-rises, the Import Building and the Export Building, which house three different universities’ London campuses stacked next to each other.

Standing outside on a sunny day, Angej Singh, 24, from India, said he came to the University of the West of Scotland’s London campus to study computing because he could get a master’s degree in just one year instead of two back home. Unlike India, he said, he also only has to turn up to classes two days a week. “It means we can enjoy our lives,” he said, adding he would one day like to visit Scotland.

The University of the West of Scotland, which last year made 65% of its fees from international students, said that it proudly welcomes international students and that, like most other British universities, its master’s courses last one year.

The government’s aim was that students who stayed would enter graduate-level jobs, where they would pay higher taxes and contribute to economic growth. However, a 2024 Home Office study showed only 30% of international students who completed their studies entered professional-level jobs. Over half of those who switched directly from student visas to work visas in the year ending June 2023 went into low-paid care work.

Last year, the government tightened international student visa eligibility, shortening the time students can stay in the U.K. after graduation and making it harder to bring family members, resulting in a 40% fall in applications across the sector.

Farage election

For Farage, the surge in immigration rescued a stuttering political career. In 2021, after Brexit, the former commodities trader was at loose ends. He briefly focused on pushing against Covid lockdowns, but Reform UK languished in the polls. So he quit.

Around that time, he began traveling to Dover on Britain’s south coast, where he would rent a boat and sail out to film the dinghies arriving full of asylum seekers. As both legal and illegal migration surged, he spied a political opportunity.

Just a few weeks before last year’s general election, Farage made a surprising decision to stand as a lawmaker in Parliament. Other than Brexit, he had a long track record of political near misses: He had lost seven previous tries to get a seat in the House of Commons.

This time he was elected into Parliament, and his Reform party won five seats. That battle was about laying down a marker, he said sitting in his office. “I wasn’t fighting that election,” he said. “I was fighting the next one.”