The human cost of Reform’s legal-migration crackdown

Nigel Farage has announced his most radical migration policy yet. Having promised last month to deport every last illegal migrant, he announced that a Reform UK government would tighten up rules on granting work visas and would make it harder to gain British citizenship. Most significantly, it would abolish indefinite leave to remain (ILR), which allows migrants to settle permanently in the UK after living here for five years. As things stand, the plan could lead to hundreds of thousands of people who are currently living and working legally in Britain facing deportation.

Speaking at a press conference in central London yesterday, Farage said that radical change is necessary to counter the looming fiscal crisis posed by the so-called Boriswave. This is the right’s coinage for the vast expansion in net migration that followed the Covid lockdowns under Boris Johnson’s premiership. According to Reform’s figures, some 3.8million people were granted long-term visas between January 2021 and June 2024, with around 800,000 of them expected to seek ILR from January 2026 onwards. This would entitle them to access social housing, welfare benefits, student loans and the NHS without paying a surcharge, as well as to bring family members to the UK. Reform says this will cost £234 billion over these migrants’ lifetimes. Already, around £9 billion is believed to be spent on welfare for non-citizens each year.

Quibbles over Reform’s sums aside (the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, which produced the estimates, has since disowned the figures), all the mainstream parties agree that this particular cohort of migrants is about to present a huge cost to an already-stretched exchequer, thanks to both the raw numbers and the high proportion who are low-skilled. This is why the Labour government has promised to double the qualifying period for ILR from five years to 10 years. Nevertheless, there is widespread and understandable dismay at Reform’s proposed solution.

Few would disagree that Britain’s borders are broken. Only a handful of activist malcontents would be prepared to defend the UK’s dysfunctional asylum system or the continued, untrammelled arrival of small boats on the English coast. Even as far as legal migration is concerned, there is a democratic imperative to get a grip on the numbers. Immigration remains the No1 issue in British politics, with 70 per cent of the public saying the influx is too high. Farage surely had a point yesterday when he blasted Johnson’s Conservatives for ‘the greatest betrayal of democratic wishes in anyone’s living memory’. A party that promised to lower net migration raised it to unprecedented levels.

Given all this, Farage would have a strong case for reforming ILR – or dropping it entirely for certain newer arrivals. Indeed, one problem with ILR is the way it blurs the line between migrant-worker status and citizenship. It is not unreasonable to expect those who are merely working temporarily in the UK to reapply for visas and to be denied access to welfare benefits. Yet the current ILR regime makes no distinction between this group and those who have laid down roots in Britain, but for whatever reason have not applied for full citizenship (whether out of ease or because their country of origin prohibits dual citizenship).

There are no doubt many on ILR who abuse the British state’s generosity, and who have made no effort to integrate and don’t intend to contribute. Parallel communities and ethno-religious sectarianism are a grim reality in parts of Britain today.

But there are also many thousands of people who have made a life here, who have worked, integrated and contributed to the nation. And they may soon have their lives – and those of their families – thrown up in the air by Reform’s plan. People who have followed the rules, and acted in good faith, with British spouses and children, would suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them.

Farage and Co seem to have forgotten the outrage of the Windrush scandal. In 2017, it emerged that potentially thousands of black, Caribbean-origin Britons had been wrongly treated as illegal migrants by the Home Office. A still unknown number of Britons lost their jobs, homes and access to healthcare. At least 80 people were wrongfully deported, despite legally holding British citizenship.

The scandal caused outrage across British society. In fact, polling found that those most angry were the over-65s – the age group who voted most heavily for Brexit, who most persistently list migration as among their top concerns. This is because they recognised the Windrush generation as British, for all intents and purposes. All they lacked was the right paperwork.

The bluntness of Reform’s approach would lead to a Windrush-style scandal on steroids. People who had a legal right to be here, until about five minutes ago, would potentially be earmarked for deportation. Families would be torn apart. Long-settled migrants would face removal to countries they no longer consider home. People who have been in the UK for decades would face the same pressure to leave as those who arrived as recently as 2021. This would strike many people as perverse.

Of course the UK must get a grip on migration. Voters are furious at successive governments who have promised control and delivered only chaos. But Reform’s plan would punish the law-abiding and rule-following. It would ensnare thousands who have laid down roots in this country. The human cost would be far too high.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.