I’m a migrant. Or rather, I was. Sometimes I’m not quite 100% sure what my classification is – I’ve been in the UK for about ten years now, and I’ve been a naturalised British citizen since 2022.
To get myself to this point, I applied for my initial leave to remain, an extension two and a half years in, followed by Indefinite Leave to Remain before finally applying for citizenship very shortly after – all over a period of just over five years or so, and at a cost (at the time) of around £10k, which excludes citizenship fees.
Ten thousand British sterling pounds for the privilege of paperwork, queues, interviews and biometrics that made me feel like I was applying to enter Fort Knox, not just to live in this country with the man that I love, himself a British national.
£10k, to prove, time and time again, that I was not a burden, not a threat, not someone trying to game the system.
£10k and years of low-level uncertainty, just to be given the permission to stay in the place I have chosen to call home.
That’s the reality of the process – long, expensive and exhausting. It makes you second-guess every move, every holiday and, to my husband’s consternation, keep paper records of absolutely everything.
Years of questions like, do I have enough savings? Are my payslips in the right format? Have I spent too many weeks outside the country visiting my family? It was a constant source of stress, a source of fear – one missing piece of paper, and POOF!, the life I’ve built here could very well be gone.
The myth of the “Boriswave”
Which is why, when I read the op-ed from Zia Yusuf last night about their plans for people who are in the United Kingdom with Indefinite Leave to Remain, I laughed.
Or at least, I laughed at first – because anyone who has actually gone through the bureaucratic hell of making the United Kingdom their home knows just how absurd it is to suggest that this country is some sort of wide-open playground where millions of people just saunter in, claim their free house and never work a day in their lives again.
And then I stopped laughing.
Because once you scrape away the now expected bluster and the headline grabbing BIG NUMBERS! that we’ve come to expect from Reform, all you’re left with is thinly veiled policy as cruelty, and you see that Reform has done what it always done – they’ve, yet again, decided to stoke fear, constructing a bogeyman of hundreds of thousands of migrants instantly going on benefits, and gave a name to it – “the Boriswave”.
I would like to address that word. Boriswave.
It’s not a thing. It’s not a category or – in any way or form – immigration legislation. It’s a marketing gimmick, a one-word-slogan instead of the usual three, which has been designed to turn perfectly legal migration – under rules created and celebrated by Boris Johnson’s government – into another existential threat for their base to get worked up about.
If you are able to brand a group of perfectly ordinary people as a ‘wave’, suddenly you can move away from inconvenient identifiers like workers, carers, doctors, students or families. You’re heavily hinting at a natural disaster waiting to happen to this country. Something which must be repelled, feared – something to prepare sandbags against. It’s the same MO that all populist-nationalist movements use – turn human beings into a faceless flood then promise you’re the only one who can build the wall that will offer them protection.
And the form of this wall?
Ripping up permanence
According to Reform, it’s abolishing Indefinite Leave to Remain altogether – not just abolishing it going forward, rescinding it retroactively.
Imagine what people who are living in this country with ILR – many for years now – must feel reading that? You have spent years building your life in Britain, ticking every single arbitrary bureaucratic box a hostile environment can conjure up, paying for every multi-thousand pound application and following every rule. You’ve finally, finally, reached the stage where the government recognises that you are allowed to remain in this country permanently, and then Nigel Farage opens his mouth and threatens to tear up that status.
That your future is now conditional on re-applying every five years, under even stricter rules, with even higher salary requirements, better English and fewer dependents1. Fail to meet the bar? Off you go.
This is not policy. This is state-sanctioned theft.
It’s retroactively ripping up contracts that the government itself has issued, and it raises a rather important question – if they can do this to settled migrants, they can do it to anyone.
Naturalised citizens (like me)? Do we get told five years down the line that our passports are now being reviewed because the rules have changed? Do we wake up one day to find our belonging was always conditional? Always at the mercy of whichever authoritarian blowhard finds themselves in power?
If you normalise rescinding permanence, permanence will, by its very nature, cease to exist. This is the precedent that Reform wants to set.
The bogus numbers game
There’s also the matter of the BIG NUMBER! they’ve chosen this time around – the £234bn pounds that migrants supposedly ‘cost’ the state. Except it’s weapons grade nonsense based on a study done by Centre For Policy Studies, a well-known right wing think tank, where they say themselves that these numbers should not be quoted. The long and short of it though is that migrants contribute nothing and drain everything – conveniently ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Because migrants don’t just work – they contribute disproportionately to the healthcare sector, care sector, transport and food supply chains. Want your parents care home staffed? Trains to run? Hospital ward to not collapse even faster than it already is?
Then you need migrants.
Reform’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of them wouldn’t save the UK money – it would collapse services, rapidly shrink the tax base and cause an economic crisis that would make the £234bn look like pocket change.
As ever, Reform’s language gives the game away – they say these changes will be done “on a staggered and orderly basis to allow businesses to train British workers to replace them”, which roughly translates into, “businesses will be crippled in the short term, but don’t worry, we promise to retrain some Brits. Eventually”.
The problem being, of course, that training takes years. You cannot just click your fingers and produce a nurse, a careworker or a radiographer. You can’t just magic a plumber or electrician or coder into existence because you’ve decided to slap a levy on visas. The whole policy is as fantastical2 as promising to replace every doctor who was not born in the UK with a freshly trained barista from Pret.
Attacking welfare and the NHS
There’s also a moral rot right at the very centre of this conversation – welfare. Reform is very keen to convince us that migrants are scamming the system. They tell us, with a knowing nod and a dark frown, that one in six universal claimants is a migrant, and that this is the proof of catastrophic abuse.
But hold on just a second – migrants make up a similar proportion, or around 15%, of the working-age population, so isn’t one in six… well, exactly what you’d expect? Because, as it turns out, migrants tend to claim welfare (once they’re able to, because while on visas No Recourse to Public Funds is a thing) at the same rate as everyone else. And when they do claim, it’s because they’re stuck in the exact same low-wage sectors that the United Kingdom depends on.
This becomes a moral lie – the vast majority of Britain’s welfare spend goes on pensioners, the people we’re being told are Reform’s core voting base. But, blaming pensioners, as a rule, doesn’t win you elections – so instead you pivot and blame the cleaner at your local hospital or the Amazon delivery driver knocking at your door.
Healthcare for migrants also finds itself on the chopping block with the policy stating that migrants shouldn’t get “free services from the NHS”. This is suicidal for the health service – because migrants are the NHS, and without them (35% of Doctors and 27% of Nurses) it collapses.
Go into any hospital, any GP surgery, any care home – who’s working there? Who’s on the night shift in A&E? Who’s plugging the gaps in care left by years of Conservative Austerity? Migrants. Strip them out of the system and you won’t be saving a single cent, but you will be creating an even more under-staffed, over-burdened healthcare system that kills people.
Cruelty as political theatre
None of this is about economics or practicality – it’s all about the show. The theatre that we’ve come to expect, time and time again, from Reform. That’s why they’ve launched this policy in the wake of a Stephen Yaxley-Lennon led rally with one hundred and fifty thousand people chanting anti-migrant slogans in London. It’s chum in the water – it’s about telling the mob that their rage is justified, the enemy is right here, in your neighbourhood, draining your resources, taking what’s yours. It’s about pointing at a brown cleaner on the bus and saying “she’s the reason why your mortgage is expensive”.
It’s about absolving the political class of their own repeated economic vandalism and handing them a convenient scapegoat, one with an accent, instead.
The copying from the Trump administration is hardly subtle either3 – they openly say that their policy ‘echoes’ Donald Trump’s plan to charge $100k for skilled visas. Nigel is desperate to prove that Britain too can play the modern-authoritarian carnival game – showing that we too, can be cruel. We too, can be transactional. We too, can sell human dignity for a damned headline.
And, of course, it alway comes back to sovereignty. “We will once again be a sovereign nation,” Zia Yusuf concludes in his Telegraph sales pitch – as if the only true meaning of sovereignty is nothing more than the right to deport your neighbours.
Despite the fact that true sovereignty isn’t built on cruelty or instability – it’s built on trust, law on the knowledge that when the state makes a promise, it keeps it. When the state grants you permanence, it doesn’t one day decide to snatch it away because the demagogue of the day is desperate for a headline.
What permanence really means
I’ve been thinking about what this policy would mean for people like me. If Reform had their way, my ILR would have been worthless, my citizenship application meaningless. I think about the fact that I could wake up tomorrow and find myself forced to apply under new rules, judged against a salary threshold that doesn’t reflect real wages, stripped of access to healthcare or benefits despite paying (a lot) into the system for a decade. That isn’t a nation of laws – that’s a nation of conditional belonging, one where your place is never secure, where your citizenship is always up for review.
And if this is the precedent we’re setting for migrants – how long before it’s set for everyone else? If permanence can become a lie for me, how long before it could be a lie for you? How long before your pension is revoked because you didn’t hit a certain salary threshold? Or your citizenship questioned because you failed a ‘good character’ review? Once you normalise the tearing up of settled status, nothing is settled.
The truth of the matter is that the United Kingdom isn’t broke because of migrants – it’s broke because of austerity, cronyism, tax cuts for billionaires, contracts for Tory donors and that big old elephant in the room, Brexit. The UK is broke because public services have been systematically destroyed, not because they’ve been accessed by people like me. The scam is not migrants claiming benefits – the scam is Farage pretending that migrants are the reason your GP surgery is closed while his pals in the city siphon of billions of pounds untaxed.
The real wave
I will repeat what I’ve said before – Reform’s entire policy platform is a conjuration – a magic trick. Look over here at the scary brown cleaner on universal credit! Look how it drains! Don’t look over there at the billionaires buying golden visas or the politicians who have sold off the country piece by piece though! Don’t look at the hedge funds, the donors or the offshore accounts!
Look at the “Boriswave”!
Be very afraid of the wave!
But I’ll tell you what the real wave is – it’s the wave of cruelty, scapegoating and the authoritarian creep that will turn your neighbours into enemies and citizens into suspects.
It’s the wave that tells you nothing is permanent, nothing is safe, nothing is truly yours – unless you fit the right profile, have the right bank balance or unless you’re the ‘right’ kind of English.
This is the wave Reform wants to unleash – and if it comes in, it won’t stop with migrants.
It never does.
- What’s the plan, do you send your least favourite child back to your country of origin and wish for the best? ↩︎
- Which, to be fair, is what all Reform UK’s policies are – pure fantasy and nothing more. ↩︎
- Reform, as a rule, does not have any new solutions – just imports from the United States. See DOGE. ↩︎
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
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