In this blog post we’re going to explore the actual law changes that led to the “Boris wave” of migration the UK has experienced.
Whilst I’m sure it’s been covered before, I haven’t seen it presented in a way that’s quick to grok, hence this analysis myself.
Firstly, if you’re not already familiar, the “Boris Wave” refers to the wave of migrants that arrived in the UK during Boris Johnson’s reign as Prime Minister from 2019-2022.
- 2019 – 788,000 migrants (gross figure)
- 2020 – 662,000 migrants (gross figure)
- 2021 – 917,000 migrants (gross figure)
- 2022 – 1,294,000 migrants (gross figure)
Gross and net are displayed below in the graph:
You can see from the above graph that the gross and net levels of migration saw a vast uptick in recent years.
A key points to note that the graph can’t represent:
- The bulk of migrants are now from non-EU countries. Relevance? Non-EU migrants are often more culturally and historically divergent than EU migrants. Also, non-EU migrants have brought more dependents than EU migrants.
Many of legal changes we’ll look at below are still in place.
The Law Changes
Multiple laws changed in order to raise the level of migration. We’ll go through them in somewhat chronological order:
Part 1
To begin, a new law was passed called the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020.
Whilst it didn’t contain specific visa rules, it opened the doors to a restructuring of the system, including the following:
- It repealed Section 7 (Immigration Act 1988) – this previously exempted EU citizens from requiring “leave to enter or remain”. Thus meaning migrants from everywhere were now all part of the same system. To elaborate on this further, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Europeans are more historically and culturally similar to the British compared with certain other parts of the world. However, from this point forward, they faced the same immigration barriers as everyone else.
- Section 5 of the act gave ministers a ‘Henry VIII power’ – the ability to amend Acts of Parliament by regulation, without new primary legislation, to rewire the statute book around the end of free movement.
Part 2
Next up are a series of changes to the Immigration Rules:
- Amendment HC 813 which created the “points based system” that went live on December 2020. It made a number of key changes:
- It suspended the annual cap of 20,700 on the Tier 2 (General) visa class, including reducing the requirements needed to apply for this visa. It’s been renamed from “Tier 2 (General)” to the Skilled Worker visa.
- The labour-market test abolition (employers no longer had to advertise to UK workers first).
- The skill threshold cut from graduate-level to A-level equivalent.
- The salary cut from £30,000 to £25,600 (tradeable down to £20,480 using their points system)
- Amendment HC 1248, active July 2021, which added an uncapped, unsponsored two-year work visa with no job, salary, or skill requirement for every international graduate – ~259,000 grants including ~45k dependants up to end of 2023. This change supercharged the student route that feeds it – with around 260-270k a year pre-pandemic to ~458-486k in 2022-2023 after this graduate route was announced. Previously, international students would need to land a job after their tuition in order to stay, but this graduate visa provides a way that they can stay in the UK for 2 further years after graduation with an unrestricted right to work.
- Amendment HC 1019, active Feb 2022, which added care workers to the Shortage Occupation List. As we’ll look at later, this led to huge levels of migration, particularly due to the volume of dependents the care workers brought with them, which was uncapped at the time.
The impact on society that this might have would be minimal if migrants were here temporarily, however, the UK has a law called Indefinite Leave to Remain (often abbreviated to ILR).
ILR means that after 5 years on a qualifying visa, you can then apply for ILR. If granted, you can stay indefinitely without need for any particular visa.