The UK government will announce measures to tackle the so-called ‘Boriswave’ — a huge surge of migrants that landed on British shores in the last years of the former Conservative government — vindicating right-wing posters who worked to bring the matter to the public’s attention.
The UK Labour government’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will announce on Monday a package of new measures on controlling immigration as her party battles to claw back support in the polls, which have shown a commanding lead for border-hawk Nigel Farage all year. According to the features mooted for the forthcoming trial in the British news on Friday for digestion over the weekend, the government intends to base its approach on Denmark’s successful and long-running reforms to make it less attractive to asylum seekers and less economically attractive for migration flows.
The Times claims the language forthcoming from the government will include speaking of migrants going “asylum shopping” in Europe, and choosing the UK because of the “excessive generosity and ease of remaining” in a country where, in practice, deportations very rarely happen. Indeed, even while asylum claims fall across Europe, Britain’s generous system sees claims continue to rise at home.
Following Friday’s soft launch, Mahmood herself added that she will implement “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times”.
Many of aspects of the Danish system would be difficult if not outright impossible to carry out in the current British political and legal environment — except perhaps by a daring and ideologically anti-mass migration government — yet the alleged intention to stop the ‘Boriswave’ migrants from getting Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) from as soon as January is both potentially doable and extremely urgent.
Under the purported plan, the time these migrants would need to spend in the UK before receiving ILR status — and with it a permanent right to be in the UK, access to enhanced welfare payments, and the conveyor belt towards eventual citizenship — would be doubled from five to ten years.
This is being portrayed as an essential cost-saving measure in this government soft-launch, given the majority of the 1.6 million Boriswavers are on less than the median wage (£29,640 or $39,000) and would be eligible for “hundreds of billions of pounds” in welfare cash in the coming years. Yet more importantly, by pushing their ILR date beyond the next general election, it opens the opportunity for a future right-wing government to potentially deport them without having to deal with the legal difficulties of rescinding ILR.
The Labour government may even start doing some of this work in advance, given that the alleged planned push for Danishification of the migration system could involve withholding ILR from migrants in the future, even once they’ve reached 10 years, unless they are taxpayers, not dependent on welfare benefits, and do not have a criminal record.
That the government is honing in on the specific issue of ILR and the Boriswave has been met with jubilation among the UK’s online right, which can claim credit for feeding these issues into the broader political conversation through social media, and conservative magazines, before it became a major line of attack for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party earlier this year.
Indeed, when Nigel Farage proposed tackling the ILR system to head off the Boriswave becoming permanently settled in the UK, he was decried as racist by the Labour government, even if they are now creeping towards his own policies. As reported when Farage launched that policy:
While the British public are “rightly” focussed on the highly visible Channel Migrant Crisis, Mr Farage said a conversation is needed about the migration that successive governments have decreed legal, hand-waving the issue away. He said: “both Labour and Conservative governments have been happy to have open-door migration, the Liberal Democrats would not criticise… and that’s why we have not had a proper, full national debate about this.
“What we are attempting to do today is make people realise that large-scale migration into Britain, where 50 per cent at least of those who come will never work and live off the British state, is actually making this country substantially poorer.”
A neologism that has entered the British political lexicon from right-wing X posters, the Boriswave describes the totally historically unprecedented wave of migrants ushered into the United Kingdom during the Boris Johnson Conservative party government. Many of these millions of arrivals of whom are now on the cusp of being eligible to receive what is called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, cementing their position in Britain for good.
Mr Farage said of this Boriswave: “…the millions that came in the years of his premiership represents the greatest betrayal of democratic wishes in anyone’s living memory. This isn’t what Brexit voters wanted, and it certainly isn’t what any Conservative voter wanted from 2010 onwards, where in election after election they were promised that net migration would come down to tens of thousands a year, and we learn that in the worst year it was… certainly over one million.”
Breitbart News reported last month that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has attempted to defend his open borders policy by admitting that it had been used as a form of human quantitative easing. Claiming that the move was an economic necessity after the coronavirus lockdowns, he complained that the criticism he receives is “so unfair”.
