It’s time to progress the bounds of acceptable public debate from being siloed into talk about illegal migration to opening a national discussion about the damage massive levels of legal migration is doing to the country, Nigel Farage said in his Prioritising UK Citizens launch on Monday.
British people have never been able to have a proper debate on the colossal levels of legal migration to the country because all the traditional parties of government agreed among themselves to keep the borders open, Nigel Farage said on Monday. The Reform UK party leader stated that when elected, he would end the era of “infinity” migration and “cheap foreign labour” depressing the wages of Britons.
While Monday’s press conference between Mr Farage and Reform UK colleague Zia Yusuf introduced a raft of new policies and promised legal measures to mass-deport migrants with no reasonable reason to be in the country, the Brexit pioneer repeatedly expressed the true purpose of his speaking out was to enter the ‘Boriswave’ of migrants into the public consciousness. and to start a debate.
While the British public are “rightly” focussed on the highly visibil Channel Migrant Crisis, Mr Farage said a conversation is needed about the migration that successive governments have decreed legal, hand-waving the issue away. He said: “both Labour and Conservative governments have been happy to have open-door migration, the Liberal Democrats would not criticise… and that’s why we have not had a proper, full national debate about this.
“What we are attempting to do today is make people realise that large-scale migration into Britain, where 50 per cent at least of those who come will never work and live off the British state, is actually making this country substantially poorer.”
A neologism that has entered the British political lexicon from right-wing X posters, the Boriswave describes the totally historically unprecedented wave of migrants ushered into the United Kingdom during the Boris Johnson Conservative party government. Many of these millions of arrivals of whom are now on the cusp of being eligible to receive what is called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’, cementing their position in Britain for good.
Mr Farage said of this Boriswave: “…the millions that came in the years of his premiership represents the greatest betrayal of democratic wishes in anyone’s living memory. This isn’t what Brexit voters wanted, and it certainly isn’t what any Conservative voter wanted from 2010 onwards, where in election after election they were promised that net migration would come down to tens of thousands a year, and we learn that in the worst year it was… certainly over one million.”
Sitting besides Farage, Yusuf called the Boriswave “the biggest betrayal” and said the magnitude of the problem has yet to really impact the country, but that it would “explode” onto the scene soon. He said: “a Reform government under Nigel expects migrants to more than pay their way, not commit crime, and ultimately to speak English and contribute to this country. The fact that this is in any way controversial says more about the state of decay and malaise and betrayal the political class has inflicted on this country.”
There was never an electoral mandate for this, nor any national debate, said Farage, saying he wanted to make the wider public conscious of what’s actually happening. He said on Monday:
…there’s been too little debate about legal immigration, too little debate about the consequences of what happened… for 20 years I’ve been asking questions about the sheer number of people coming into this country, the impact that its had on housing, on health, on roads. But I’ve been told for 20 years to shut up and go away. Because it’s good for the economy, and that’s all that matters… But now we’re beginning to learn the truth, that simply what we’ve been told on this wasn’t true.
Far too many that have come don’t work, have never worked, and never will work. The ability to bring dependents of all kinds when you realise that most that come are very low-skill and on very low wages. You start to get a very, very different picture. In fact, you start to get a massive benefits [welfare] bill.
The numbers of migrants involved and the fact that many will never be net tax contributors to the government were cited as a major problem for the public finances, which unless tackled head-on now will bankrupt the country, Farage warned.
Offering a party platform of politics to combat these issues, Mr Farage said his government would be able to save an “eye-watering sum of money” by simply abolishing Indefinite Leave to Remain altogether, replacing it with American-style five year working visas. This would remove the UK anomaly of those coming to the United Kingdom even on extremely low wages being able to bring large numbers of dependents, who in most cases become recipients of welfare payments.
Mr Farage said: “This is grossly unfair on taxpayers, they are being absolutely hammered to pay for people who are not British citizens. And in terms of the national debt, well we’ve got major problems looming there already. We are not the world’s food bank. It is not for us to provide welfare to people coming in from all over the world. The 800,000 who will get indefinite leave to remain — unless this policy is revoked — tend to be young, tend to be low-skilled, tend to be a burden on the state.”
Migrants would simply not be permitted to claim welfare payments in Britain any more, they said, underlining that under their ‘Prioritising UK Citizens’ plan, welfare benefits in Britain would be for Britons. While much of the discussion surrounds money, the fiscal cost of open borders, Yusuf said it was about much more than that, adding: “that’s before we talk about the robbing of British people of their culture, the robbing of our young people of opportunity”.
In all these changes, if delivered by a future Reform government, would mean potentially hundreds of thousands of deportations. Yusuf said while they anticipated legal challenges to these moves, one “quite cool” thing about Parliament being sovereign is that a motivated government can simply create new primary legislation to deliver the will of the people. It can also, he said, leave any international organisations — like the European Court of Human Rights, which routinely blocks any attempts by the UK government to deport migrants — that try to stand in its way.
While the change of course proposed is a major one, it couldn’t be argued to be a particularly unpopular one. As reported last week when Reform Member of Parliament Lee Anderson pushed back against a statement of the UK’s left-wing government that defending borders is not an optimal use of the armed forces, public support for both Farage’s Party and its ideas is high:
…an overwhelming majority of Britons, 69 per cent, support the notion of the government tasking the Royal Navy to shut the English Channel to human trafficker boats. Just 18 per cent said they were opposed to performing border control in this way.
A majority said they believed migrants are being drawn to the UK by the nation’s generous welfare system, and half said migrants see the UK as a soft touch. Just 37 said they think migrants are actually fleeing conflict when they come to Britain.
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