In this blog post we’re going to explore the actual law changes, word by word, that led to the Boris wave of migration the UK has experienced.
If you’re not already familiar, the “Boris Wave” refers to the wave of migrants that arrived in the UK during Boris’ reign from 2019-2022.
- 2019 – 788,000 new migrants
- 2020 – 662,000 new migrants
- 2021 – 917,000 new migrants
- 2022 – 1,294,000 new migrants
You can see from the above graph that the annual levels of migrants are unprecedented since around 2021, certainly 2022.
Other key points to note since the legal changes:
- The bulk of migrants are now from non-EU countries. Relevance? Non-EU migrants bring more dependents than EU migrants.
- Many of the legal changes are still in place, hence even after Boris left power, there were 1,326,000 new migrants
So what laws changed?
Multiple laws changed in order to give rise to the mass migration. We’ll go through them in somewhat chronological order:
Part 1
To begin, 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.
How?
- It repealed Section 7 (Immigration Act 1988) – this previously exempted EU citizens from requiring “leave to enter or remain”.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 January 1, 2021. It suspended the annual cap of 20,700 on the tier 2 visa class, including reducing the requirements needed to apply for this visa. (Note: it’s called a suspension, but at the time of writing (2026) it’s yet to be resumed).
- 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 ~458-468k 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.