After Brexit, the UK government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson embarked on a 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 Earth’s best & brightest. The program, meant to attract lower numbers of skilled workers, backfired.
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, in 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.
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