Nigel Farage Pledges To Reverse The Legal Migration "Boriswave"
3 min read
Nigel Farage has criticised Boris Johnson’s record on immigration and promised to reverse the ‘Boriswave’ which saw millions of people arrive under the last Conservative government.
The Reform UK leader set out plans to force all migrants with permanent residency to reapply for visas, with new requirements to speak English and earn more money.
Farage claimed immigrants who first arrived under the ‘Boriswave’ in 2020 – the increase in the number of legal migrants who came to work in the UK under post-Brexit migration rules – will be entitled to benefits and NHS care as early as 2026.
Reform also promised to stop foreign nationals from accessing the welfare state, claiming it would save the taxpayer almost £250 billion.
While the party has used much of its energy to highlight small boat crossings, Farage said there had been too little focus on the impact of legal immigration.
“For 20 years, I’ve been asking questions about the sheer number of people coming into this country, the impact that it’s had on housing, on health, on roads."
He added: “I want to be absolutely clear at the outset that we are here to make massive future cuts to welfare spending. I promise we'd announce this or something like this at our conference a few weeks ago.
“If we don't, well, what is coming down the track will best part bankrupt us, although some might say we're almost there, looking at the 30-year gilt yields this morning. Under a Reform government, welfare will be for UK citizens only.”
Farage said the sheer scale of migration since 2019 represented the “greatest betrayal of democratic wishes” in living memory. After the UK left the EU formally in 2020, net immigration soared and reached a record a net one million.
The Reform UK leader said: “This is not what Brexit voters wanted, and it's certainly not what any Conservative voter wanted from 2010 onwards, where election after election after election, they were promised that net migration would come down to tens of thousands a year.
“And we learn it was up to in the worst year, a million, although we haven't yet got the revisions for the time... it almost certainly will be over one million.”
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s head of policy, accused the Conservative Party of “turning up as firefighters to their own arson” over its proposals to cut immigration.
Writing for The Telegraph, Yusuf said hundreds of thousands of migrants will be forced to reapply for visas after losing their settled status. He wrote that the policy would be staggered in prevent disrupting business too much.
He claimed many of those who will lose their leave to remain are dependent on the welfare state and will leave voluntarily after losing access to benefits.
