THE ASTONISHING TRUE COST OF THE BORISWAVE

And why Reform’s new policy is not all it seems

BRITISH PATRIOT’S SUBSTACK

Nigel Farage has now announced a crucial new Reform UK policy to block the ‘Boriswave’ of millions of low-skilled migrants, who have invaded Britain in the last three years, from getting Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and bankrupting the country. Here is the policy in Farage’s own words:

“We will abolish the indefinite leave to remain status, which grants migrants the right to live, work and study in the UK permanently with full access to Britain’s health and benefits system. This threatens to bankrupt our bloated welfare state. We will rescind ILR statuses that have already been granted. We will also restore the treasured status of British citizenship.

Why is this so urgent? Starting from January 2026, if nothing is done to stop it, those 3.8 million migrants will become eligible for ILR. Let’s be clear, these migrants are not doctors, engineers or entrepreneurs. Many of those eligible for ILR never work and never will. Many are young and old dependants who followed family members here. They are now a burden on the welfare state …

Once we abolish ILR, foreign nationals who want to work here will have 180 days to apply for a tough, new five-year renewable visa. They will have no right to benefits or healthcare without insurance. And no right to bring dependants, unless they are high earners who can afford to keep them.”

Farage (and Yusuf, Reform’s Head of Policy, who co-announced this at the press conference) made clear that these new renewable work visas, would have a qualifying salary “materially higher than it is today”, and people with criminal convictions would be banned. There would also be visas, called an “Acute Skills Shortage Visa”, for workers in critical occupations (such as care workers) , where there was no suitably-qualified UK candidate, but there would be a cap on the number allowed, and – and here is Reform’s revolutionary policy idea – employers who bring in workers on such visas would have to pay into a fund to train British workers to do those jobs in the long-term.

So far, so very good. This will be an excellent policy going forward. BUT … Nigel Farage stressed multiple times at the press conference that announced this policy that the Boriswave – those migrants that came from January 2021 to June 2024 – was a fast-approaching economic cataclysm that had to be stopped. He was right about this (as we shall see later), but the tragedy is that Reform’s policies will NOT avert the economic disaster that is about to engulf us.

Why not? Because by the time of the next election, in 2029, all of the Boriswave will not only have already received ILR but most will also have been able to apply for British citizenship. And Farage stated that Reform would “never, ever” take back citizenship from people already granted it! So despite Farage’s promises, all of these parasites will, in reality, be allowed to stay and drive Britain into a financial black hole that will bankrupt the country and doom our children to a life of misery and poverty.

But surely I am exaggerating, you might think. After all, how much will these parasites really cost us?

According to Reform the total cost over the lifetime of the immigrants will be £234 billion. Or rather, according to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – because Reform have simply copied all their calculations from a paper that this think tank published back in February! Now, I completely understand why they did this blatant act of plagiarism. It wasn’t laziness or stupidity, it was a political calculation that by using the calculations of a respected and independent think tank they would avoid the otherwise inevitable criticisms from both their political opponents and the media of having exaggerated, cooked the books, distorted the facts, etc. So using the CPS figures was a defensive act, a shield designed to demonstrate how moderate and reasonable they are.

OK, fair enough, except that the figures are a load of bollox.

Both Farage and Yusuf made it clear that they thought the true cost was probably much higher (which it is, as we shall see), but in that case they should have had the courage and intelligence to come up with their own figure! If they wanted to, they could have said that the figure is ‘between X and Y‘, where X is the CPS figure and Y is their own, but don’t just give a ridiculously-low number and then say, in effect, that it’s probably wrong! That’s just nonsense.

And the ultimate irony is that this tactic didn’t work anyway. Why not? Because the CPS – a Conservative-supporting organisation – have deliberately tried to sabotage Reform by disowning the cost projection in their own report!!

So, what’s the problem with the CPS figure?

To work out the economic contribution or cost of immigrants you need to know two things: how much people at different levels of earnings put in or take out of the economy, and how many immigrants fit into each earning profile. The first is relatively straightforward. The government knows the average cost of state school education, for instance, or the average cost of NHS care for people of different ages. And, of course, they know how much people pay in tax according to how much they earn. So this is easy.

The problem is knowing what immigrants actually earn. Throughout their paper the CPS complain about the lack of reliable data available, especially regarding migrant employment and earnings. They refer to the Office of Budget Responsibility’s [OBR] “extremely optimistic assumptions about migrant earnings” and say “We believe there is a very strong case that the average salaries of this new migrant cohort are substantially lower than the OBR suggests” pointing out, for instance, that “the average salaries of various groups strongly represented in the post-2020 migration wave – such as Indian and Nigerian nationals – have absolutely cratered in the last few years” .

As for government estimates, these are worse than worthless. Take, for instance, the health and care visa. We are told that “The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) estimated 6,000 migrants a year would make use of it. Other departments thought the number could be as high as 40,000. These were woeful underestimates. In 2023 alone, 348,000 migrants received a health and care visa – 58 times the DHSC projection”. 58 times!!! Just let that level of government prediction incompetence sink in. And not only that – “Overall, 647,000 migrants received health and care visas in the period we are studying – but 377,000 of those were dependants. That’s 1.4 dependants per worker.” Remember this average of 1.4 dependants – we will return to this later!

We were told by Boris Johnson that the points system introduced after Brexit would prioritise valuable high skilled, high-earning workers. But this was a lie. The CPS tell us that “Looking at skilled worker visas, we found that more than 50% were issued for what were essentially minimum wage jobs, often in social care.”

By the way, in case you are thinking that the CPS might be being unfair on the government for their lack of accurate data, just note what parliament’s Public Accounts Committee had to say in their July 2025 report on skilled worker visas! Here are a few of their comments:

• “The Home Office made changes to the Skilled Worker visa route without a full assessment of the risks or potential impacts”
• “Nearly three times more people used the route in the first three years than the Home Office expected, but it has not evaluated whether the route was meeting its objectives”
• “the Home Office does not understand what happens to people when their visas come to an end”
• “there has been insufficient collaboration between the Home Office and other departments on the role of immigration in sectoral workforce strategies”
• “The Home Office has not had a full understanding of how immigration has helped to address skill shortages or the unintended consequences of the much higher than anticipated use of the Skilled Worker route”
• “the Home Office has not done enough to fulfil its responsibilities”
• “it does not understand whether those who have lost their sponsorship are taken on by other sponsors or what happens to people at the end of their visa, including whether they leave the United Kingdom after their visa expires or remain without a valid visa and work illegally.”

And if the data on those coming on worker visas is poor, there are no “profiles provided for migrants arriving on family or humanitarian visas”. And here again, it turns out that everything we’ve been told was a lie. Remember, for instance, those Hong Kong refugees that the pro-immigration fanatic Boris Johnson decided, with zero consultation, to allow to come here in unlimited numbers? We were told that these were high-earners who would boost the economy. Well, err, the reality is sadly very different: “we would instinctively expect those arriving on Hong Kong BN(O) visas to be among the most fiscally positive. Yet even so, studies have found that only 52% of those who arrived via this route are employed. Moreover, almost half (47%) of those who are working say they are doing so at a level below their skills and qualifications”. Oh dear ….

And what about spouses? Well, the CPS report explains that “Spouses coming over as dependants on work visas are more tricky to allocate fiscal profiles. As the Migration Observatory has noted, dependants on work visas face no salary thresholds on the work they can legally do. Given their much lower barriers to the labour market, we have almost no idea what they are earning as distinct from any other group – if indeed they are working at all.” And indeed, most are not working: “around 55% of these will probably never work”.

And yet, despite all this, the CPS report says that although “we would expect the average migrants arriving on non-work routes to have an even worse lifetime fiscal outcome than the ‘low-wage’ migrant worker in the OBR’s analysis. … we shall forbear from attempting to construct a fiscal profile, and instead treat these migrants as similar to the OBR’s ‘low-wage’ migrants – even though that will yet again leave us underestimating rather than overestimating the long-term fiscal costs”. This is madness and shows what an extreme underestimate the CPS final figure is!

But let’s now turn to the OBR claims about the financial cost or benefit of migrants. It’s a statement of the obvious that people on high wages contribute more than they take out, whereas those on low wages take out more than they put in. It’s also obvious that children are a cost to the economy (due to NHS costs for their birth and early years and their education costs, together with the fact they aren’t working), whereas highly-paid workers paying taxes are net contributors, and pensioners again become an overall burden due to their pensions and their greater healthcare needs.

So over their lifetime a migrant’s economic value to the country can depend on many factors: at what age they arrive, how many years they work, whether they have any children, etc. The OBR gets around all these complications by simply assuming that migrants arrive at the age of 25 and have no dependants.

But hang on – we’ve already seen that migrants do bring dependants with them – 1.4 each. So that’s wrong to start with. And what about the age they arrive here at? Well, “In theory the Home Office should hold data on the ages of all migrants issued with visas. But this is not something the department chooses to publish in its quarterly statistical updates”. That’s right – they refuse to share this information! As the CPS say with a clear tone of exasperation: “in lieu of anything better, the OBR analysis is where we shall have to start”.

And the OBR calculation is that someone coming here at 25 and living the average lifespan (to the age of around 80), who is on low wages, will end up being a net drain to the British economy (ie. your taxes and mine) and cost around £600,000 over their lifetime. But remember that lifespans are increasing, and by the time these people reach old age this is likely to have increased. Which means they are likely to cost much more. Should they live just a few extra years, to 85, that cost rises to around £770,000.

Of course, if they are high earners they will cost less, or could even be net contributors, but how many will fall into that category? Nobody knows, since while the OBR has had a stab at “life-cycle analysis for ‘low-wage’, ‘average-wage’ and ‘high-wage’ migrant workers … this is produced using the Labour Force Survey, whose data is so unreliable that it is being shelved and overhauled. It is particularly unreliable, sadly, when it comes to migrant families and those on low earnings.”

Despite all of this, and despite explicitly stating “there are strong grounds for scepticism about the distribution of migrant earnings used in the OBR’s analysis”, the CPS admit that they took “the OBR figures as gospel – putting the most optimistic gloss possible on the fiscal contribution of these new arrivals … We have consistently erred on the side of caution: potentially significantly underestimating the costs of very old age; and the costs of very young age; the costs of migrants getting ILR via family and humanitarian visas. We have also, as outlined above, adopted what we strongly believe to be an overestimate of recent migrants’ earnings, for want of any more useful data”.

So that’s how the CPS came to their final figure – which Reform UK have simply copied and accepted. As the CPS say: “using the OBR’s extremely optimistic assumptions about migrant earnings, the lifetime net fiscal cost to the state would be £234 billion … Under more pessimistic assumptions, the costs could be very significantly higher.” You bet they would be!! And not with “pessimistic assumptions” but realistic ones!

But possibly the most grievous fault in the CPS report and estimate is that they openly admit that they ignored “‘chain migration’, i.e. when ‘individual members of a community migrate and then encourage or assist further movements of migration’, often through family connections. Each migrant who receives ILR will have the right to bring over spouses and children on family visas. Given the flaws and gaps in the official data, we have excluded this phenomenon from our analysis. And just to make things worse, the CPS also admits that “We are also implicitly ignoring the costs of any children born in the UK to recent migrants who then go on to get ILR.” Frankly, these two failures alone make their estimate a worthless load of garbage.

So what is a better forecast for the cost of the Boriswave?

Let’s start with the basic number who are likely to get ILR. Of the 3.8 million who came in total, the CPS conclude that the total number who could qualify for ILR “is over 2 million”.

So how many will actually apply for ILR? The estimate the CPS uses is 801,000. This is what they base they final cost estimate on, but they admit the number is likely to be much higher. Their estimate is based on historical ILR application rates when most migrants came for the EU, but as the CPS point out: “Given that we are taking many more people from poorer countries – GDP per capita in India is $10,166, Nigeria $6,207, Pakistan $6,037, and Zimbabwe $3,820 – there is a strong case that they would be more motivated to stay in the UK than those arriving from wealthier countries under the old migration system, especially as there is now a significant existing diaspora from such countries to settle into”.

The CPS lick their finger, hold it in the air and take a pure guess at a possible 1.224 million who might in fact apply for ILR. But their cost estimate is not based on this. Frankly, I think even this is a ridiculously low number. The proper approach is to use human psychology and logic and to ask why any of these third-world migrants would want to go back to their poverty-stricken shithole countries. Would you, in their place? Of course not.

So a much more realistic estimate is to say that all two million will apply for ILR. And if anyone is tempted to argue this is too high I simply respond by saying that any overestimate here is more than compensated for by the ‘chain migration’ and subsequent children that are not included in this cost estimate. And also, I further add that this figure does not include all the rest of the 3.8 million who came and who will either claim asylum (5,000 students a year do so) or simply overstay their visa and go to ground. After 5 years they will pop up, with a family in tow, and claim the right to stay here on humanitarian and family grounds.

The next question is how many immigrants will work and what will be their level of earnings? Again, the CPS have gone for the most insanely optimistic figures in both cases. As they admit: “for the sake of simplicity, we have assumed in our model that all adult migrants on work visas will be working, rather than incorporating dependants who may have essentially zero lifetime earnings.” And as for their earnings, they complain that “the quality of data on recent migrant earnings in the UK is desperately poor”, and then just groundlessly and unjustifiably divide migrants arbitrarily as 25% high-earners, 50% average-earners and 25% low-earners. This is utterly delusional.

We have already seen that the majority of those with even skilled worker visas are, in fact, doing minimum-wage work, and we have seen that most dependents are not working at all. A much better estimate – and even this is probably much too generous! – is to assume they are all low-paid, minimum wage workers. And not to exaggerate the overall cost we’ll stick with the OBR assumption (even though this is also never justified) that migrants arrive on average at 25. And we’ll also stick with the current lifespan, rather than the more obvious conclusion that this will be extended and therefore migrants will cost us more.

So what’s the actual cost of the Boriswave?

The calculation is now very straightforward: using the figures above we have two million migrants who will cost £600,000 each over their lifetimes.

So the total cost is £1,200,000,000,000 – yes, that’s right: £1.2 TRILLION !!!

This is more than FIVE TIMES what the CPS and Reform claimed, and is, as it happens, about the same as the government’s TOTAL annual spending! This is insane.

As I said before – this will bankrupt Britain. We are completely fucked. Your children will live a life of poverty and misery.

And Reform’s policy will NOT prevent this, as they are not going to remove the UK citizenship to those who have obtained it already, as these parasites will have done by the time of the next election. It’s a complete disaster.

There is, however, one way for Reform to square the circle and keep their promise to honour the UK citizenship while saving Britain from total economic ruin: let them keep their UK citizenship but BAN THEIR BENEFITS unless they were BORN in the UK.

Will Nigel make this face-saving – and Britain-saving – U-turn? I don’t know, but if you are a member of Reform, or have any influence over the leadership, please make sure they see this article and act on it!

I want to finish with a couple of broader criticisms of this policy: Yusuf (who is actually responsible for this policy) wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “Britain is going broke. Last year, the British taxpayer spent £266bn on welfare. £52bn of that went on Universal Credit. Of that, almost £9bn went to foreign nationals. One in 6 people on Universal Credit are foreign nationals.” This is absolutely true – but why then is Reform’s policy only targeted at the Boriswave, and not all immigrants receiving benefits??

At the press conference Farage was asked about this several times, but kept stressing that he only wanted to talk about the most recent migrants, refusing to answer the broader question. Was this tactical, wanting to get the media – and through them the public – to focus on Boris Johnson’s wrongdoings (and by extension the Tory party)? Or is he just too weak to grasp the nettle and get rid of all the foreign parasites? I really don’t know.

The same applies to EU citizens claiming benefits. Thanks to pressure from Rupert Lowe the government was recently forced to reveal that around 700,000 EU citizens living in the UK are receiving benefits – and this does not include Irish citizens, who are counted as if they were British! These should all be denied benefits, but Yusuf merely said that Reform would seek to discuss this with the EU. That’s just not good enough.

And finally, Yusuf stated: “We will also increase the qualifying period to become a UK citizen to 7 years.” Eh?? You waht?? Apart from the fact that this is only one year longer than the current rules, so is a pretty insignificant change and hardly “restores the treasured status” of British citizenship, the real question you have to ask is what on earth is the point of claiming you are restricting ILR and benefits to foreigners if anyone can just get around this by claiming UK citizenship after 7 years and then get all the benefits anyway? This makes no sense whatsoever! Reform really need to clarify their thinking here and tighten up the rules as this is just bonkers.

If you have any more information, or any comments, do let me know below! I always love to hear from my readers.

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This article (THE ASTONISHING TRUE COST OF THE BORISWAVE) was created and published by British Patriot’s Substack and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Labour Will Regret Defending the Boriswave

LAURIE WASTELL

Reform UK has made another major policy announcement, once again using a Monday morning press conference to capture the news agenda for the week. Nigel Farage’s party is to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), ending the right of migrants to qualify for permanent settlement in the UK after five years of residency. The policy aims in particular at preventing the millions of largely unskilled arrivals since 2021 from gaining permanent residency and eventually British citizenship – the infamous, disastrous influx known as the ‘Boriswave’. Under the scheme, migrants with permanent residency will need to reapply for visas under stricter criteria, including higher language and salary requirements. “It is not for us to provide welfare for people coming in from all over the world,” said Farage, in a robust political framing that rightly puts the interests of the British taxpayer first. Research by Karl Williams of the Centre for Policy Studies has shown that the lifetime cost of the recent influx could be some £234 billion (see the Sceptic Episode 36).

Headlines have been dominated by the practicalities of the policy, with the Labour Government coming out swinging against it. Chancellor Rachel Reeves derided it as “gimmicks” having “no basis in reality”. Leftie think tank Best for Britain said it would “tear families apart” as Labour mouthpieces denounce it as “extreme” and “vulgar”. A Labour backbencher even retweeted a columnist calling the policy “racist”, while Sadiq Khan fumed that “threatening to deport people living and working here legally is unacceptable”.

Given that the Boriswave was widely agreed to be a major mistake by the previous Government, whose immigration track record voters remain furious about, it seems deeply politically foolish for Labour to ride to its defence in this way. Not least given that action on ILR is (ostensibly) already set to become Government policy. Back in May, following Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, there came the unlikely but welcome announcement from Yvette Cooper’s Home Office that it would be going after the Boriswave, pledging to extend the required ILR qualification period from five years’ residency in the UK to 10. The then Home Secretary had “for some time been concerned” about the coming “significant increase in settlement and citizenship applications”, according to a Government source. I wrote for the Spectator noting that this was a victory for the young British Right in bringing this policy into the mainstream.

But this brief Labour foray into sanity on immigration was always going to be a hard sell to the Left of Starmer’s party. First, within weeks, the PM had U-turned to say that he “deeply regrets” the rhetoric of his anti-migration speech.

Now, the broader question is whether the Government will follow through on its pledged policy changes, too.

Naturally, rather than go ahead and legislate in the national interest, Labour’s first instinct was to pledge a consultation. But four months after the ILR reforms were announced, that consultation has so far not started. A Home Office spokesperson said it would arrive “later this year”.

“We believe that people should contribute to the economy and society before being able to settle in our country”, the spokesperson said. “This is why the amount of time migrants have to spend in the UK before qualifying for settlement will double from five to ten years.”

However, a recent debate on two petitions to Parliament about the ILR changes does give a sense of the mood in the Labour ranks. For those who would see the Boriswave reversed, it isn’t pretty. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite and former leadership contender, said merely the publishing of the White Paper had caused “huge fear” among many of her Salford constituents. “At a time when far-Right groups are exploiting fear,” said Steve Witherden of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, the Government should instead be “pushing back firmly” by creating “shorter, more affordable routes to settlement”. Several others cited “fairness”, “compassion” and “British values”, in what looks set to become a mawkish Leftie crusade for liberal sentimentality on immigration broadly – only lent greater fervour by Reform’s pressure to their Right.

That this is against both the country’s interest and ultimately that of the Labour party will likely mean little to these doe-eyed idealists: they will gladly go down with the ship to prevent any change to the current dispensation. The Labour Left has already managed to torpedo the Government’s much-needed welfare cuts (see the Sceptic episode 43), with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves capitulating to backbenchers’ demands and suffering a major blow to their authority in the process. The result of that debacle has been steeply rising gilt yields, as the bond markets increasingly doubt Britain’s ability to reduce spending to sensible levels, portending grim prospects for the autumn Budget.

But to Leftie hardliners, immigration is arguably even more totemic than welfare. Plus Starmer has lost his bridge to the Left in the form of Angela Rayner, while the knives are already out for his Right-posturing aide, Morgan McSweeney, over the Mandelson affair. This means getting this policy over the line will likely prove a fight this unsteady Labour leadership will simply not have the stomach for. For new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, touted by allies as “hard as nails” and somehow believed to be capable of winning Labour voters’ trust on immigration, it will be as significant a test as stopping the boats. It seems highly unlikely she will pass.

With the first Boriswavers set to qualify for ILR early next year, that prospect is worrying indeed. Still, it will however be grist to Reform’s mill. As the next election inches closer, Farage will continue to have no trouble at all presenting the Tory-Labour uniparty as having totally failed the public when it comes to immigration.

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This article (Labour Will Regret Defending the Boriswave) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Lsurie Wastell

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