Britain needs action on legal immigration, not just illegal immigration
23 Sep 2025
The weakening of British borders has been expensive and undemocratic
This article was originally published in The Critic
At Reform UK’s annual conference in Birmingham earlier this month, I introduced a panel discussion on how to reverse mass immigration and clean up the mess left by successive Labour and Conservative governments. Around 300 people packed out the theatre in the conference venue, with standing room only. Evidently, the subject struck a chord with the audience.
Since last year’s general election, the public discussion of immigration in Britain has focused overwhelmingly on illegal immigration. It is not hard to see why. Illegal immigrants coming across the Channel and straight into taxpayer-funded accommodation is a florid example of state dysfunction. Few things expose the failure of the rule of law as clearly as Britain’s inability to deport those who have no right to be in the country, despite Parliament passing law after law intending to stop the boats and secure the borders.
However, while the national focus on small boats and asylum has helped to shift the overall conversation — immigration is now comfortably the public’s most important problem facing the country, according to YouGov — it has come at the expense of a discussion about uncontrolled legal immigration.
This is why I addressed the matter at our Prosperity Institute event at Reform UK’s recent conference. The future conversation, and the agenda of any government that wants to maintain public trust, must attend to ending and reversing the age of mass immigration.
Those who come to the country legally far outnumber those who come here illegally, and legal migrants overstaying their visas make up an increasing proportion of those claiming asylum. Indeed, legal immigration has spiralled out of control since the pandemic, peaking at over 900,000 people per year in 2023. It declined to around 400,000 in 2024, but this is still higher than the 330,000 figure in 2015 which precipitated the referendum on the UK’s departure from the EU the following year.
Small boats arrivals number around 50,000 so far this year — a significant number, particularly when each arrival is committing a criminal offence by coming here on a dinghy and is subsequently housed by the taxpayer. But the impact of these migrants is tiny compared to the long-term effects that mass, legal immigration is going to have — and already has had — on the country.
The situation today is unsustainable and undemocratic. As we discussed at the Prosperity Institute event, the status quo across both politics and the economy is almost designed to ratchet endlessly towards greater immigration, regardless of the promises made by politicians to bring it down. However, this highlights the scale of the economic and bureaucratic challenge facing those who wish to bring the era of mass immigration to an end.
For example, there is no cap on visas. The system we have today is employer-led, so employers can obtain visas for their staff if they meet the right criteria and pay the appropriate fees. While this might appear like an example of market-driven immigration policy, in practice it allows for essentially near open borders.
This did not happen by accident. Following reforms to immigration policy in 2020, the last Government, under Boris Johnson, removed previous rules which ordered employers to hire British workers in the first instance, before recruiting overseas. A minimum salary threshold of around £25,000 was introduced for skilled work — with lower rates available for roles deemed to be suffering from a labour shortage — and the definition of “skilled” work was reduced from being degree-equivalent to being A-Level equivalent. Much of this was introduced because of fears that the end of freedom of movement with the EU would deprive Britain’s labour market of a near limitless supply of low-skilled labour. So, despite the British people voting to leave the EU overwhelmingly because of discontent with immigration, the Government decided to enact an immigration policy to make it as easy as possible for people to move to the UK, even at the lower end of the wage scale.
The worst example of this was the Health and Care Visa, introduced in 2021. This was supposed to plug a temporary shortfall in care workers, exacerbated by the pandemic. Between 2021 and 2023 over half a million people moved to this country on this visa, but fewer than half of these people actually arrived on work visas: the majority came as dependents. Over 400,000 people have moved to the UK on this visa from India, Nigeria, or Zimbabwe. As care workers were placed on the Government’s shortage occupation list, they were often hired on low wages, around £23,000 a year. Most of these people have come from poor countries and it is highly unlikely that their dependents are going to be net economic contributors in high- or medium-wage sectors. They were also given exemptions from paying the NHS immigration surcharge. Despite the huge numbers of people arriving on this visa, shortages in the care sector persist, likely thanks to a combination of migration pushing wages down, fraud (many care homes sponsoring visas didn’t actually exist), and the growth of in-country switching, which allowed migrants on care visas to switch to other types of work visas. Today, over 75 per cent of care home staff are British, down from 83 per cent in 2020, according to Skills for Care. This remains quite high for a sector which one is led to believe is dependent on foreign labour.
All of this adds up to an expensive burden for the public finances. The skills, salaries, and tax contributions of migrants have declined, and in 2026, the first cohorts of migrants from 2021 will become eligible for indefinite leave to remain, entitling them to full access to Britain’s welfare system, equal to British citizens. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates this could cost the taxpayer over £200 billion. Meanwhile, Britain’s public finances are under immense strain. The cost of borrowing is reaching crisis levels, and the country seems incapable of growing its economy out of a self-imposed trap of low-productivity and low-wage migration combined with growing welfare dependency.
If the situation is so self-evidently dreadful, why hasn’t anything been done to change it? There has been some tinkering at the edges since 2024. Grants of health and care visas declined after the Government increased salary thresholds and made the visa ineligible for dependents. This rather gave the game away. The Government has also proposed doubling the standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from five to ten years. It is essential that this is delivered, and all major parties would be wise to collaborate to make this proposal a reality.
These changes are not enough, though. Large chunks of the British economy are plugged into the mass immigration complex, and employers and their representative bodies lobby the Government to maintain special visa routes for their lines of work. Sectors like hospitality, agriculture, and heavy industry warn the Government of total economic collapse without easy and limitless access to overseas workers. Higher education, once a jewel in Britain’s knowledge-rich economy, has turned into a visa-issuing service in recent years, supposedly completely dependent on the fees of overseas students, who are paying via the post-study work visa for access to life in Britain rather than for a high-quality education. Universities have been one of the main forces preventing serious immigration reform, claiming that without fees from foreign students, there will be mass closures of universities up and down the country and the loss of respectable, white-collar jobs in many of Britain’s poorer towns and cities. As such, the unhappy open borders fudge continues. Ministers break their promises to the voters, repeating platitudes about high-wage and high-skilled immigration while the public see the “Deliveroo visa” grey economy grow, and their public services decay before their eyes.
Ending the era of mass immigration will, therefore, not be easy. This week, the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama, criticised British efforts to cut immigration, saying “Where the hell will you find the people to build your houses, to serve you the coffee, to be your taxi drivers, to be your truck drivers?” This sentiment is often echoed in the press. However, many of Rama’s barbs, while popular, are fallacious. The recent lorry driver shortage was solved not by visas but by domestic regulatory reform to licencing rules, and the construction workforce is around 85 per cent white British.
Many of the poor economic conditions which have encouraged us to turn mass immigration are self-imposed. If we could address these, the fallacious economic case for mass migration would lose what little persuasive power it still has. For example, declining British fertility is often cited as a justification for higher migration, with more numbers needed to prop up the economy. But tumbling fertility rates are a global problem, and migrants tend to conform to the fertility rates of their host nations. We should focus on how to fix the leaks in our demographic bucket, rather than trying to fill it with an endless flow of new arrivals.
Elsewhere, there is a large amount of low-hanging fruit in the UK which can be retrieved to wean the economy off its alleged dependency on overseas labour. The British tax system has long penalised productivity-enhancing investments by businesses, thanks to uncompetitive corporate tax allowances and business rates which go up if an entrepreneur improves his premises. Energy costs to operate advanced machinery in Britain are the highest in the developed world, and we have a dysfunctional planning system which penalises development, making it harder for British people to move within the UK for new jobs. By contrast, employers have been rather successful in lobbying the Government to include all manner of jobs on the shortage occupation list, which until recently included takeaway and administrative office staff, among others. Even today’s slimmed down replacement — the Immigration Skills List — includes social scientists, all forms of tradesmen, and artists. In such a context, it is no wonder that immigration has become such a feature of the modern economy. It is one of the only forms of activity that the British Government hasn’t conspired to penalise out of existence.
Britain’s recent expansion in legal immigration has been a disaster. It is already imposing huge costs to the public finances, which will only increase; it has not grown the economy as its advocates wished; and it has been imposed against the public’s wishes. Ending and reversing this experiment is just as important to any government as stopping the boats. It will require strategic thinking and foresight to deliver, and politicians with political nous, genuine courage, and a positive vision for the future to bring the country and the political class with them. Failure to do so would put Britain in a bleak place, with a fractious population disillusioned by democracy. If the mood of the Reform Conference was anything to go by, the British people are optimistic and hopeful for change. But their patience is running out.