The post Beware The Burnhamwave first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

The post Weak Budgets and Even Weaker Borders first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

The central proposal is perfectly reasonable: raise the standard qualifying period from five years to ten, and require settlement to be earned through contribution and integration. Given the scale of the migration surge, this is basic prudence and a nod to fairness for the British taxpayer. Yet even this sensible measure, it seems, goes too far for Andy Burnham’s administration, which faces resistance from some cabinet ministers and, perhaps, from Mr Burnham himself.

In July we warned: “Whatever Ms Mahmood’s intentions may be, it is obvious that Labour’s far-left backbenchers will have none of it.” That warning looks painfully prescient. Communities Secretary Angela Rayner has publicly attacked applying the changes to those already here, while Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh repeatedly declined, in an interview on Sky News, to back the proposed extension of the qualifying period for care workers. Labour looks hostage to its own open-borders zealots.

Nor can ministers hide behind a need for primary legislation. All that is necessary is a change to the immigration rules, as this House of Commons Library note explains that: the immigration rules can be changed without a new Act of Parliament.

The issue also goes beyond the Treasury’s cautious cost estimates. Permanent settlement creates additional demand for housing and public services, hinders integration and threatens cohesion. The British public deserves better. We expect our government to put the national interest ahead of internal party squabbles.

Ms Mahmood must commit to a firm timetable for the necessary rule changes and, once they are in place, apply them to those already here who have yet to be granted ILR. Exempting the Boriswave would gut the reform exactly where it matters most.

Her dithering risks turning Boris Johnson’s immigration failure into a lasting burden, one that will surely be worsened by mass immigration and chain migration from the new routes she is proposing.

The public aren’t fools, Home Secretary. A consultation is no excuse for procrastination. It is time to get your act together, deliver on your promises and face down your recalcitrant, out-of-touch colleagues in Cabinet and on the backbenches.

The post Dither, Delay and Pay The Price first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

We have published other papers before and since (most recently just last week – the over-reliance on overseas workers – we wrote about it on these pages). Then, only this week, an excellent paper from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), State of Dependency, exposes the continuing reality of our broken economic model, and the high cost of high immigration. Between 2014 and late 2025, 3.7 million payrolled jobs were added to the UK economy, yet just 734,000 – barely one in five – went to British nationals, while 2.5 million went to non-EU workers. Turning Britain into a globalised economic zone is failing our people; passing over British workers for imported labour inflicts profound structural, fiscal, and social harm on the country.

At Migration Watch UK, we warned in 2020 that abolishing the Resident Labour Market Test (the “First Chance” rule requiring firms to advertise new roles in the UK first) and lowering skill and salary thresholds would expose 16 million UK jobs to uncapped worldwide competition. Stripping away that protection allowed employers to bypass British jobseekers entirely. As the CSJ reports, since 2020, payrolled jobs held by British citizens have fallen in nine out of 12 UK regions, even as non-EU employment surged everywhere.

Why does it matter so much when British workers are passed over? First, because an endless supply of overseas workers acts as a subsidy for big business, destroying the incentive to train our own youth or invest in productivity-boosting automation. The domestic skills ladder has been systematically dismantled: over a million young people in the UK are now considered NEETs, or “Not in Employment, Education or Training”. Because entry-level jobs in hospitality, retail, and social care are increasingly filled from abroad, disadvantaged young Britons are denied the vital first rung on the career ladder.

Second, sidelining domestic workers creates a devastating fiscal double-whammy for the British taxpayer. Today, 6.7 million people in Great Britain claim out-of-work benefits, and welfare spending over the last 20 years has exceeded infrastructure investment by over £1 trillion.


Simultaneously, importing low-wage labour drains the Exchequer. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that a low-wage migrant arriving at age 25 is a net fiscal drain throughout their life, costing taxpayers £150,000 by state pension age and roughly £600,000 by the UK average life expectancy of 82. We are effectively paying twice: once to keep millions of working-age Britons idle on welfare, and again to subsidise the public services and infrastructure required for low-wage overseas workers.

Finally, this addiction to cheap labour suppresses wages and stagnates living standards. While immigration drove around 7 million of the UK’s 8 million population increase in the two decades after 2000, GDP per head barely budged after 2010.

Britain is a national home, and its Government has a duty and moral obligation to its citizens. We are not a borderless hiring hall. Our economy has become increasingly, and dangerously, dependent on immigrant labour. That didn’t happen accidently. The previous administration pursued this policy intentionally because employers, universities and NGOs told Boris Johnson’s administration it was necessary. It was not, and the British people are now paying the price. We must end this madcap, headlong rush towards national hara-kiri. There are a number of measures we must introduce, but mainly restore: cap visa numbers; restore the First Chance rule, prioritising British workers and offering jobs to them before employers considering recruiting from overseas; and compel employers to invest in the British workforce. The Home Office must also take back responsibility for vetting work-visa applicants before they arrive at the UK border. This means bringing back overseas-based visa officers. In the long run these measures would save the British taxpayer billions.

The post Stop This Madcap Rush Towards National Hara-Kiri first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Mass immigration can subsidise a business model founded on cheap labour. When another recruitment drive abroad is available, the pressure to improve wages, train existing residents or invest in machinery weakens. Employers enjoy the immediate convenience; the country inherits the longer-term consequences. We should judge immigration policy by whether it makes Britain more productive, rather than whether it keeps today’s staffing arrangements intact.  

Migration Watch has warned about this for years. In 2016, we said lower-skilled migration “maintains the UK’s poor productivity levels while pushing down some of the lowest wages, especially in the care sector”. The solution we advocated was better wages and improved working conditions. Regrettably,  politicians chose a different path, with:  poor wages, questionable e  working conditions, sustained by continued recruitment of foreign workers willing to work for less, culminating  importation in the disastrous army of migrant care workers and their dependants. Our 2019 paper on immigration and productivity also stressed that trying to solve labour shortages by importing labour, rather than focussing on improving skills, wages and automating, would be a mistake.

Research in Denmark by Katja Mann and Dario Pozzoli examined employment conditions and the workforce  between 1995 and 2019. They estimated that a one percentage point increase in the local share of non-Western migrant workers reduced the probability of large firms adopting robots by about 12%. Their explanation was substitution: cheap workers performing routine tasks discouraged investment in expensive robotics. Migration-fuelled labour gluts can postpone the adjustment that a more productive economy requires.

Japan offers a different response to labour shortages. It plans for ten million AI-equipped robots by 2040, rather than following Britain’s model of mass uncontrolled migration. Stanford research on Japanese nursing homes found that care robots eased retention problems and increased care-worker employment by 28%. They helped staff do their jobs, illustrating how investment can improve working conditions and expand capacity. Britain should take thais lesson seriously. The technology is no longer theoretical. It is already being deployed effectively in other countries, and there is no good reason why we could not follow suit.  

But this is not simply an economic question. Care homes can change their business model much faster than a country can provide for a rapidly growing population. Some 650,000 care workers and their dependants came in the period 2022 to 2024. The consequences of such a massive flow of people extends far beyond power-skill workers being recruited for particular jobs. Just as concerning – perhaps more so – as the rules now stand, and according to to the Home Secretary, 1.6 million people are in line to qualify for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) by 2030 (and thus full access to generous welfare and benefits), and potentially onto permanent benefits dependency should they become unemployed. Moreover, they and their families would still need homes, schools and healthcare. As we have seen time and time again, such circumstances are a recipe for tension, turmoil and instability.

Meanwhile, UK-born workers would also face disruption. We believe this strengthens the case for preparing the public for technological change. We also need a debate on credible plans for training, automation,  better pay and work conditions, as well as investment in sectors that turn to overseas labour with knee-jerk reactions. Here’s some of our own work on labour shortages and how immigration can stymie innovation.  

Regarding work migration, we need a controlled, properly managed – and capped – system that gives due weight to skills and earnings, limited accompanying dependants and no automatic qualification for ILR, which should not be even considered unless people have lived and paid into the system for at least 10 years. Businesses must also be firmly encouraged to invest in research and use of technology, while committing to training re-skilling of the domestic workforce.  

Robotics and AI offer us an opportunity to wean ourselves off immigration, if only our government had the nous and gumption to stand up to the mass immigration and open borders zealots. Somehow, this seems unlikely under a government led by Andy Burnham.  

The post Robots, Not Migrants first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Ms Mahmood has said numbers will initially be in the hundreds, eventually rising into the “low thousands”. We recall such assurance in the past. In 2004 we were told EU enlargement would lead to an annual 5-13,000 coming from new member states. 1.5 to 2 million came in succeeding years. Similarly, when Romania and Bulgaria could claim free movement rights in 2014, we were told only a handful of Romanians andBulgarians would come. In both cases, we said  official and academic forecasts were way-off and that hundreds of thousands would come. In the event, millions did. We were right, officials and academics were wrong. 

Ms Mahmood’s vague promises of a cap are not worth the paper they are written on. Once the door is opened, the pressure to bring as many as possible of the 118 million displaced people (a United Nations figure) from around the world will be relentless. Remember, those admitted will be on a path to permanent settlement, and therefore full access to housing, medical attention, schooling for children and to the UK’s generous welfare system.

All that the government is doing is outsourcing a huge chunk of immigration and asylum responsibilities to communities, charities, universities and eventually employers.  The Home Office says it will retain control over who can act as a sponsor and that arrivals will undergo biometric, criminality and health checks. But given the many problems  implementing immigration and asylum policy entails – the inability to deport those who enter illegally, the perverse judicial rulings preventing the deportation of people who pose a genuine threat to the public, the experience of countries that have tried similar sponsorship schemes – only to regret it – makes us wonder why the government is doing this. Why it is putting in place what will surely become a de facto chain migration route?

We haven’t heard anything about the potential cost to the taxpayer of the scheme and what access those arriving will have to benefits and public services, should  sponsors prove unable to meet their obligations. What family reunion rights will accompany their status? And what happens when the sponsorship support period ends after two years?

However, what this scheme won’t do is stop illegal immigration across the Channel.

Meanwhile, bodies we would regard as inclining towards open borders, such as the Refugee Council, having now pressed the government into submission on  “safe and legal routes”, have already begun demanding their expansion. Its chief policy analyst, Jon Featonby, responded to Ms Mahmood’s announcement by saying the Government must provide “thousands of places, not hundreds” and reopen refugee family reunion. It’s just an opening salvo. Just wait until they really get going.

That illustrates the problem with presenting this policy as an answer to illegal immigration. Once a legal route exists, ideological activists and those who directly benefit financially from increased asylum claims will call for expansion of the scheme with ever-louder voices.

Meanwhile, the underlying asylum challenge remains immense. Since Labour entered office in July 2024, Migration Watch calculates over 73,000 small boat migrants have illegally crossed the English Channel. Over 70% were Young military aged men. This compares to just 70,000 full time fully trained personnel currently serving in the British Army.

Shabana Mahmood now risks her own “Shabanawave” (we call it a Shabbywave) of immigration dressed up as a scheme to bring countless numbers of people from countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea and of course Palestinians as well as umpteen other trouble spots around the world. But we can’t allow our new PM to escape blame for the calamity ahead of us. Without his approval, this hair-brained scheme would not be happening. It will be as much a BurnhamWave as it will a ShabanaWave.

The post The Shabanawave Approaches first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

In 2019–20, Britain issued around 120,000 work visas. By 2023 that had rocketed to over 600,000, the highest total in modern British history, before easing to roughly 400,000 in 2024. Ministers will point to that fall and call it progress. It isn’t. The system still runs at more than double its pre-Brexit rate: skill thresholds were cut to A-level equivalent, salary floors lowered, the Resident Labour Market Test abolished, and employers handed free rein to recruit from anywhere in the world.

Much of the increase runs through a single route. The Health and Care Worker visa, waved through in 2020 as an emergency pandemic measure, has now issued nearly 710,000 grants, more than half of all work visas combined. Nevertheless, the failures and mistakes made regarding the health and care visa apply generally to the work visa. An emergency fix has become the permanent business model for recruiting NHS and care staff, propping up a workforce Britain has spent decades failing to train enough of its own people to fill. The Home Office effectively licences ‘trusted employers’ to recruit, often with the help of local recruitment agencies, unlimited numbers of numbers of workers they claim to need. Such a process is wide open to abuse and often is.

The number that should worry ministers most, as it has the public, is not just how many workers came but also who came with them. In 2023, for the first time on record, dependants outnumbered the workers themselves: roughly 260,000 family members against 225,000 main applicants, a ratio of 1.16 dependants for every worker. A route sold to the public as filling job vacancies, in practice, became a family-settlement channel in all but name.

The countries now supplying these visas have narrowed sharply too. India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines now dominate, with India alone accounting for over 1.4 million work visas since 2005, including more than 160,000 skilled-worker grants in 2023 alone. That is not diversity. It is concentration risk, leaving British hospitals, care homes and universities exposed to labour-market shocks in a handful of countries thousands of miles away.

Here is the part ministers would rather you didn’t notice. Almost everyone admitted on these routes can apply to settle after five years, so the 2020–2024 “Boriswave” cohorts already guarantee a wave of permanent settlement whatever the government does next. Migration Watch’s central estimate is around 384,000 grants of Indefinite Leave to Remain between 2025 and 2029 from these cohorts alone, potentially exceeding 600,000 in total: a city the size of Glasgow added permanently to the British population within a decade, and the decision has already been made.

This is the trick behind every claim that migration is “coming down”. Visa numbers can fall for a year or two while settlement and citizenship totals keep climbing, because today’s totals are simply yesterday’s decisions catching up. Ministers cannot have it both ways: either they act on the routes still open, or they accept that the promise to bring numbers down was empty.

Our report sets out what actually fixing this would require: firm annual caps on the Skilled Worker and Health and Care routes; real restrictions on dependants, if indeed they should come

at all; a genuine return to higher skill and salary thresholds; and a revived Resident Labour Market Test that forces employers to look at home first. None of this is complicated. What has been missing for twenty years is not the policy. It is the political will to design limits in, rather than promise them after the fact.

The post The Work-Visa Boriswave: How “Control” Became a Settlement Machine first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Any serious discussion about immigration control therefore has to look beyond the beaches of Kent and towards the decisions being taken, every day, in the Home Office itself.

The post Don’t Get Distracted first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

The post From Control to Dependence: A Review of the Work Visa System first appeared on Migration Watch UK.

Immigration is one of the most serious failures of public policy in Britain over the past thirty years. Yet, despite the purpose of the Committee hearing being to scrutinise the Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026, some questions at times strayed from examining how the legislation would achieve the Government’s stated objectives of reducing illegal immigration and restoring confidence in the asylum system, and descended into political point-scoring.

When asked what evidence there was of measures that had proved successful in dealing with illegal immigration and reducing the number of asylum applications, Alp offered Australia, Denmark, Italy and the United States as countries that had succeeded in slowing or of almost halting the flow of illegal border crossings, adding little in the Bill came close to emulating the measures adopted by any of these countries. Denmark, for example, had confiscated valuables to help meet the cost of accommodating migrants; failed asylum seekers were held in camps pending removal; and measures had been introduced to prevent parallel societies from developing by limiting the proportion of migrants in any given area. There were also lengthy qualifying periods for indefinite leave to remain (eight years). None of this was in the Bill.

According to some reports, a number of countries, including Greece and Italy, had even turned boats back, while the United States had all but sealed its southern border and pretty much halted illegal border crossings along its border with Mexico.

The Member of Parliament for Glasgow South West, Dr Zubir Ahmed, challenged the reference to the United States by asking whether Alp was advocating a model in which “American citizens are being shot dead in the streets”. Alp was puzzled by Dr Ahmed’s question and its relevance to what had happened along the US–Mexico border, which had the desired effect. A government that demonstrates that unlawful entry will not result in indefinite residence creates a very different incentive from one that repeatedly proves incapable of, or unwilling to, remove those who arrive illegally.

As Alp told the Committee, securing the border is hardly an alien or un-British idea. Practical measures such as detention on arrival, rapid processing and the return of those with no right to remain were standard practice for much of the post-war period.

Between 2018 and June 2026, around 210,000 people were detected arriving by this route – more than the entire strength of the combined British armed forces.

Alp argued the Bill does not address the central incentive behind the boats: the expectation that reaching Britain gives an individual a strong prospect of remaining here for a very long time, whatever the eventual merits of his claim.

Dr Ahmed also suggested that leaving the European Union had reduced Britain’s ability to deal with the problem – this is, frankly, nonsense. Alp said, in practice, returns under the Dublin Treaty were few in number in either direction, often took months to arrange, we often took in more than went in the other direction, and provided little deterrent. Alp pointed to what he saw as the Bill’s biggest flaw: its further opening-up of the border through the proposed “safe and legal routes”. These routes would allow approved organisations, institutions, and employers to sponsor asylum seekers.

Under the Bill, any of the 118 million displaced people worldwide (according to UNHCR) who has a relative in the UK or can secure sponsorship from a university, prospective employer, or community may be eligible to enter through one of these routes. Although there have been vague suggestions that the numbers will be capped, it remains unclear how the cap would be determined, who would set it, or whether there would be separate caps for each route or a single overall limit. Alp warned that we would rue the day this part of the Bill came into force.

He further argued that this loosening of the system could ultimately dwarf the Boriswave, a development against which Migration Watch had repeatedly warned. As with the Boriswave, by the time the Government realises what is happening, it may already be too late. Our Chairman concluded that the Bill represented another missed opportunity. If the Government were serious about ending illegal immigration, he argued, it should have gone further by committing to withdraw from the ECHR and ECAT (the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings), repealing the Human Rights Act, and restoring the requirement for migrants to satisfy an immigration official of their bona fides, as used to be the case.

The Bill should also have stipulated that anyone arriving illegally and without documents be denied the opportunity to apply for asylum and refused entry pending removal. The requirement imposed by the courts for the Home Office to disprove a claimant’s backstory is, he argued, both absurd and dangerous.

The post A Serious Problem Deserves A Serious Debate first appeared on Migration Watch UK.