There was a time when economists and politicians told us “Britain would grind to a halt” without migrant workers. We were told immigrants would pay their own way, earn more than British-born workers, fund our pensions and strengthen our public services. Those arguments are dying. The Migration Advisory Committee has demolished the fiscal case. And now, astonishingly, politicians are using the failure of immigration on economic grounds – which Migration Watch warned would be the case – as an argument to hand millions of migrants access to Britain’s welfare state.
We are already seeing the Parliamentary Labour Party rallying to oppose Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s earned settlement reforms, which would double the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from five to ten years. The reforms target the so-called “Boriswave”: the millions who arrived between 2020 and 2024, the vast majority on non-work visas and the rest in typically low-paid roles.
Last week, Dame Emily Thornberry MP (who, as readers may recall, was forced to resign from Labour’s Shadow Cabinet after sneering at a home flying English flags) decided to go even further, posting a video arguing that preventing the Boriswave accessing benefits would be “cruel”. She drew on an Institute for Public Policy Research report which found that 46 per cent of children in migrant families live in relative poverty, compared to 25 per cent for British-born children.
Strip away the emotive language and what Ms Thornberry and the IPPR are actually admitting is that the Boriswave is made up primarily of low earners who were never going to be a fiscal benefit to Britain. The IPPR itself acknowledges that low wages are a major cause of migrant poverty. Nearly 900,000 recent migrants earn less than the median wage. Our government has imported hundreds of thousands of people who, far from paying our pensions, will always be a net cost if they are allowed to claim benefits and use free NHS care.
These costs are already becoming apparent in government data. The Department for Work and Pensions published stats showing the number of people with ILR status claiming Universal Credit surged from 95,612 in April 2022 to 222,076 by January 2026 – a 132 per cent increase. All this while tax thresholds for working British people have been frozen since 2021, and are set to remain so into the 2030s.
Yet the conclusion the IPPR and Labour backbenchers draw is not that we should reverse the error, but that we should give the Boriswave benefits so they are not in poverty any more. The IPPR proposes that migrant families be exempt from ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ rules, given 30 hours of free childcare a week, and provided with better housing. Unsurprisingly, there is not a single reference in the report to the impact on the British taxpayer of such boundless generosity.
And this, of course, does not even touch on the wage compression caused by flooding Britain’s labour market with poorly paid migrants. The economics are simple and predictable; if you increase labour supply, the price of labour will fall. The Bank of England confirmed as much, finding that immigration has a negative impact on wages in semi-skilled and unskilled service occupations, precisely the sectors most affected by the Boriswave.
For pro-migration zealots, the prescription is always the same: more welfare, more spending, more obligation on the British taxpayer to pick up the tab for a social engineering experiment they have repeatedly rejected at the ballot box. Far from leaving us better off and enriching our culture and society, uncontrolled migration has propelled demographic change (a minority White British population looms ever larger on the horizon), made us poorer, undermined our culture and stoked tensions and division in our society.
The only way out of this mess is to abandon the obsessive focus on the rights of those who choose to come to the United Kingdom. Elevating their rights above those of British citizens is both wrong and profoundly unfair. If Labour MPs, human rights lawyers, and progressive liberals cannot even accept modest, sensible changes to the routine granting of Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), what hope is there for the radical reforms to the immigration system that the country desperately needs, and has called for in every election over the past 20 years?
