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20th October 2025
08:14am BST
It’s almost poetic that the loudest voices now decrying Britain’s immigration numbers are the same ones who fought hardest for Brexit. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party have spent the last few weeks raging about what they call the “Boris wave” - the rise in immigration following our exit from the European Union. But their outrage misses a fundamental truth that too few people grasped at the time: when we were in the EU, we actually had a far better handle on migration than we do now.
The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. Leaving the EU was sold to voters as a way of “taking back control” of our borders. Yet the numbers tell a different story. Net migration has soared since Brexit, with arrivals from much further afield than before. The government’s points-based system - designed to attract “skilled workers” from anywhere in the world - has created a stickier, less flexible kind of migration. It’s not that people are suddenly flooding in; it’s that they’re staying.
Before Brexit, much of the movement between the UK and the continent was short-term and cyclical. The EU’s free movement system wasn’t a one-way ticket for “them” to come here - it was a revolving door. Poles, Spaniards, Romanians and others came to Britain for a few years to work in bars, kitchens, construction sites and care homes, then often went home again. Meanwhile, we exported our own form of economic migration: retirees chasing the sun to Spain and Portugal, propped up by generous pensions and property windfalls from homes that cost them next to nothing decades ago.
It was, in many ways, a symbiotic relationship. We got bar staff, waiters, plumbers and electricians who filled vital gaps in our workforce. They got a higher wage for a few years’ graft. And we got to bask in their countries’ hospitality when our leathery-skinned pensioners retired to the Costa del Sol, where they happily spent their British pensions and bolstered local economies. Everyone won.
But that nuance was lost amid the hysteria of the referendum campaign. EU migration was painted as uncontrolled and permanent, when in reality it was fluid and self-regulating. The proximity of the continent meant people could - and did - move back and forth with relative ease. That’s not true when your migration policy pivots toward countries thousands of miles away.
Immigration from further afield, by its nature, tends to be more permanent. If you’ve uprooted your life from Nigeria, India or the Philippines, you’re not likely to come for six months and go home again. You’ll bring your family, put down roots, and make a long-term commitment to a new country. That’s not a bad thing in itself - but it’s a different kind of migration, and one that’s far less responsive to economic shifts.
The Brexit promise was that we’d replace EU migration with a “smarter” global system that met the country’s needs. Instead, we’ve created a more rigid model that’s harder to control in practice. Employers are still desperate for workers, but the government’s visa rules make short-term labour expensive and bureaucratic. Sectors like hospitality and agriculture - once sustained by flexible European workers - are now struggling to cope.
So when Farage rails against the latest migration figures, he’s railing against a monster of his own making. The EU didn’t impose uncontrolled immigration on us; it offered a framework that reflected geography, economics and reality. It let people move when there was work and return home when there wasn’t. That’s control - just not the sort that fits neatly on a campaign bus.
Now we’ve swapped a system that worked for one that doesn’t, all in the name of sovereignty. The result? Higher immigration, not less. Fewer tools to manage it, not more. And the belated realisation, whispered even among some Brexiteers, that we once had a better grip on the very thing they swore to fix.
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