It is with sadness that I write our last report on Migration Watch’s incredibly important findings and alerts on the immigration crisis. How different this country would be today had government heeded all the reports, analysis and demographic warnings and acted on the advice of this highly important think tank over the last 25 years.
That, of course, must have been what the amazingly prescient former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Andrew Green (now Lord Green), hoped for when he founded Migration Watch in 2001 along with David Coleman, Professor of Demography at the University of Oxford and the former diplomat and Ambassador to Iceland, Alp Mehmet. Alp, whom I have had the honour of knowing these past 12 years or more, succeeded Lord Green in 2019 as chairman, having served as vice-chairman for the preceding ten years. The third man of an extraordinary team – men of calibre that this country, in politics at least, seems so short of. You can find all his articles for TCW here.
Alp Mehmet has been extraordinary over his tenure – sticking to his guns and never letting any policy development or ever-worsening immigration and work visa data off his radar. Never letting political correctness get in the way of the evidence. Migration Watch has not just tracked the boats but also put the spotlight on the (far greater in numbers) legal methods and means of immigration access, from temporary work visas, to student visa, to family dependents and asylum, in fact every aspect of a routinely abused and mismanaged system. All this he has done with a small staff and small budget, never climbing off this treadmill of work.
If anyone deserves a peerage, it is he. But who will give it to him? Telling the truth does not go down well with our uni-party politicians. I live in hope that should Reform UK or a right-wing alliance win the next election, he will be top of their list.
Here is Migration Watch’s latest report, this time on the abuse of care work visas. I quote their briefing directly.
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Home Office figures released this week show that chain migration stemming from the disastrous care worker visa (a major component of the so-called “Boriswave”, the surge in migration as a result of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s immigration policies) remains a serious problem. Cameroon sent just 12 health and care workers to Britain last year, yet 180 visas went to family members from the same country in the year to March – or fifteen relatives for every worker
. With regard to Ghana, 257 workers brought in 2,131 dependants; Bangladesh: 139 workers, 747 dependants; Pakistan: 1,029 workers, 6,155 dependants, India: 2,395 workers, 10,504 dependants.
How can this be, when ministers told us care workers would be banned from bringing dependants over two years ago? Because the ban applies only to new applicants. Those already here (and the care worker element of the ‘Boriswave’ was enormous, with 108,000 main-applicant visas in the year to December 2023 alone) can still have dependants join them.
Work and study dependant arrivals peaked at 374,000 in 2023, the largest dependant inflow in British history. Migration Watch has documented this in depth – please see our paper on student visas here, and keep an eye out for our upcoming paper on work visas.
The dependant visa is, of course, only the first link. Migrants can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) after five years of residency, at which point they can become sponsors in their own right and apply for full British citizenship. Citizenship grants, at 237,000 last year, were the second highest since 2005. Well over two million more Boriswavers remain in the queue for Indefinite Leave to Remain – the first stage in obtaining British citizenship.
Whether that cohort waits five years or ten depends on what happens to the reforms proposed by Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, which appear to have hit the rocks with Labour backbenchers and activists fighting tooth and nail to thwart the Home Secretary. Despite promising to address the looming settlement crisis, Ms Mahmood is reportedly weighing exemptions for ‘hundreds of thousands of care workers’. How will Andy Burnham, PM in waiting – who has repeatedly flip flopped on migration policy as we covered in an earlier newsletter – react? Will he face down his mutinous far-left Labour backbenchers? We doubt it.
To those who say extending the dependant ban to care workers already here is ‘un-British’, we say that what is truly un-British is ignoring the will of the British people and forcing them to pay for untrammelled and costly migration. Remember, extending the qualifying period for ILR doesn’t mean there will be fewer migrants in the country or that it will discourage many migrants from coming here to settle.
According to the Migration Observatory, over 60 per cent of UK population growth from 2004–2022 was due to immigration. When we factor in the children born to migrants during this period the population increase due to migration was closer to 85-90 per cent. Rapid population growth means millions more people requiring public services, putting strain on healthcare, housing, and transportation. Immigration on this scale makes integration and assimilation impossible; this spells disaster for the future stability and cohesion of our society.
The ‘island of strangers’ that Keir Starmer warned of in May 2025 (even if he did regret saying it) looms ever closer; hastened by chain migration under which the Boriswave put rocket fuel.
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