Four years ago, Nigel Farage decided he had achieved all he could in British politics.
The gregarious English populist had campaigned for decades for Britain to leave the European Union, arguing the U.K. needed to make its own regulations and stop European migrants flowing in freely from the Continent to live and work.
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Now Farage is back—and Reform UK is currently leading in the polls—largely thanks to an unexpected twist: After Brexit, the U.K. government of then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson embarked on a new 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 the planet’s best and brightest people.
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.
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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.
The 61-year-old Farage, long dismissed in Westminster as influential but unelectable, is now being taken seriously as a possible prime minister, though national elections are unlikely before 2029.
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Brexit was approved by referendum in 2016 and implemented in 2020. Johnson unveiled a new immigration policy shortly after that he said put “people before passports.” Europeans were no longer able to work visa free in the U.K., and a cap on the numbers of non-EU migrants was scrapped.
In its place was a system that allowed companies to sponsor visas to hire an unlimited number of foreign workers, many of whom were permitted to bring family members with them. While workers had to be “skilled,” the definition was very broad, from roofers to business executives. And some industries were permitted to hire foreign workers on wages below market rates in Britain.
The current Labour government, which defeated the Conservatives in elections last year, has tightened restrictions on visas to bring migration down. {snip}
But legal immigration is still running at a pace of just under half a million a year, nearly twice the pre-Brexit average. Illegal boat crossings are also on a record pace so far this year.
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In Britain the situation became particularly toxic because the government repeatedly claimed that it was going to cut immigration, all while letting ever more people into the country. In recent years, annual immigration has equaled the population of cities such as Manchester and Liverpool—in a country struggling to build enough housing and other infrastructure and where more than seven million are on waiting lists for routine healthcare.
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After fierce lobbying, the result was a relatively liberal migration system. Employers no longer had to try to hire workers from Britain before recruiting from abroad. To acquire a skilled-worker visa, foreign workers weren’t required to have a college degree, they just had to be offered a job with a minimum salary of £25,600, which at the time was 23% below the full-time U.K. median salary.
There were also carve-outs. Firms could sponsor visas in certain sectors, such as construction, where there was an acute shortage of workers, paying them as little as £20,400 a year. And students could come with their families for a one-year master’s course, and stay on for two years after completing their studies.
Net migration from the EU went into reverse, and arrivals from elsewhere surged. In 2021, 93,000 people arrived from India. By 2024, that number was 240,000. The number of Nigerian migrants increased fivefold in the same period.
Many arrived with families in tow. In the 12 months ending March 2024, nearly half of all visas were issued to dependents, not workers.
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