Stopping the Boats Won’t Fix Britain’s Migration Crisis

How Much Abuse Are We Willing to Tolerate for the Benefits of Immigration? It's time to take The Sniff Test.

Jun 05, 2025

Not in Polite Company

Immigration is in the headlines. Last Sunday’s papers accused Keir Starmer of losing control of channel crossings. There’s a straightforward solution to stopping the boats. It requires the UK to accept a set number of migrants through regular channels. The fact that this number is less than we already take in each year, shows that stopping small boats does not deal with a bigger challenge.

The majority of immigrants come to work or study. Several of the government’s latest measures make it harder to stay, which is tackling the wrong end of the problem. The issue is who is allowed in, not whether established migrants should remain.

The reality is that people smugglers run rings around government regulations. The result is modern slavery cases in the UK, while we moralise about forced labour overseas. When Turkish barber shops become a national joke and Albanian gangsters are a feature of popular culture, it’s high time to clean house.

Immigration is an emotive subject. Just repeating government statistics in polite company earns an intervention from my wife. Nobody will agree with all I am about to say. But we need to ask ourselves a serious question. How much illiberal behaviour do we tolerate to satisfy our need to be liberal?

How to Stop the Boats

There were 948,000 long-term arrivals in Britain last year. Less than 4% of that number came on a small boat and they were only a third of all asylum cases. Stopping the boats requires removing the incentive to pay people smugglers.

Since 2018, 71% of small boat arrivals have been allowed to stay. In the year to June 2024, most asylum seekers came from Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey and Syria. The year before Albanians were most common, but after a bilateral agreement, most arrivals from there are shipped home. With less incentive, fewer Albanians make the trip.

The European People’s Party proposes that Britain accept around 20,000 migrants a year from safe countries in the EU. In return, those countries would take back every arrival by boat on British shores. The incentive to pay the people smugglers would disappear overnight.

Britain will have to accept a higher number to be able to send back all irregular arrivals. The EU has long noted that we have fewer migrants per person than many continental countries. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility however, to stop almost all of what are called irregular arrivals. In return, we take in our share of documented migrants arriving in Europe.

Feigning Surprise and Outrage

Most of Britain’s asylum seekers are not coming here to assimilate. Many are escaping religious persecution and want to be free to practise their faith. A historical analogy might be the Pilgrim Fathers.

Last month, two civil servants in France published a report about how the Muslim Brotherhood was spreading its influence. There were the usual cries of alarmism and the report was brushed under the carpet. No one should be surprised that a well-funded organisation, committed to an Islamic state and sharia law, would pursue its documented aims. Yet feigning surprise, or outrage, is the default position in the West.

The Muslim Brotherhood is hosted and sponsored by Qatar, a country skilled in peddling influence. The gift of a new Air Force One is a fraction of the $100 billion that The Free Press reports has been spent influencing politics, media and education in America. Qatar spends three times what Israel does on political lobbies and yet no one claims it controls the country.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not banned in the UK, while it is in several Middle Eastern countries. In March 2024, it was named on a list of extremist organisations, along with far right groups. The Brotherhood operates through a network of affiliates such as the Muslim Association of Britain, the British Muslim Initiative, and the charity The European Trust.

Members arrive in Europe and North America as students and activist exiles fleeing persecution. Their purpose is dawah, or proselytising, building acceptance of the need for Islamic law from the bottom up. This filters into grass roots politics with local councillors, such as Maheen Kamran in Burnley, calling for segregated public spaces.

There’s a lot of talk about ghettos in the right wing press. To me, a ghetto sits on the fringe of society and is a place where no one goes. London is too big, and too diverse, to be a ghetto. Nonetheless, white British children are a minority throughout central London.

This is not going to reverse. The Office of National Statistics does not publish birth rate by ethnicity or religion. It does however, tell us that British born mothers have an average 1.5 children and foreign mothers a touch over two. Most foreigners in Britain are not asylum seekers. Yet many who come to study go home, and if you come to work you are forced to assimilate to some degree.

Neil O’Brien, the source of the chart above, says that half of London’s council homes are occupied by immigrants, and in half of these the head of the household does not work.

In 2024, there were 336,366 households on the capital’s waiting list for social housing. Work began on only 3,991 affordable homes. With a desperate housing shortage and pressure on government services, it is little surprise that sections of society open up to a more populist message.

The Charities Aid Foundation ranks Britain the third most generous country in the world. As a nation we pride ourselves on doing the right thing by refugees. Many come here because of wars that we played a part in, most notably in Afghanistan. Again the question is how much of a blind eye do we turn to illiberal practices to justify our liberalism.

The Abuse of Care Workers

While the press hounds Keir Starmer for being unable to stop the boats, his government is addressing regular migration. The focus is on net numbers, because a large number of people leave the country each year. Most are returning students, but 10,800 millionaires also left last year. The Adam Smith Institute calculates their lost tax payments to be equivalent to 528,000 average taxpayers.

As soon as Brexit came into full effect, the government opened the door to record arrivals. In part this was due to skill shortages. The cap on students was also lifted and over the next three years, hundreds of thousands were accepted under humanitarian programmes for Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan.

Opponents of Brexit wave these statistics around saying we told you so, but immigration numbers are a result of government policy. Recent changes make it harder to come and stay by legitimate routes, although they have not yet restored the situation from five years ago.

The UK needs to sell education to foreign students. Their money helps balance our yawning trade deficit. I am less convinced by the case for certain types of workers.

This chart shows the number of nationals from outside the EU coming to study or work in Britain. Students are the largest category and bring few dependants. Workers bring families, scuppering any notion that most arrivals are single men.

Care workers are classed as skilled workers. Facing a shortage during Covid, Britain created a special visa. There was a rush of applicants with dependants, which recent rule changes no longer allow. In 2023, with Covid fading, care workers received half of all UK work visas.

On arrival, some were charged illegal recruitment fees of up to £20,000, putting them in debt to their employer. Others faced £10,000 fees to quit and cannot leave their job as a result. 30 care agencies set up to recruit workers are under investigation for modern slavery. In the 18 months to December 2024, 470 care providers lost their licence, impacting 39,000 workers. These figures are all from the government.

If we want international banks, lawyers and consultants to be in London, we need a strong, stable and open financial system. We need genuine skilled workers with international networks. They must be able to sell worldwide, otherwise another location works just as well. This situation is in sharp contrast to indentured care workers, paid subsistence wages and often held in a job against their will.

Special visas, privileged entry and blanket acceptance of asylum, lead to a boom in exploitation and people smuggling. The question remains how much abuse of the system do we tolerate to get the benefits of immigration?

The Definition of Skilled Worker

The definition of skilled worker covers any role that requires the equivalent of at least A-levels. Approved occupations include bricklayers, chefs and fishmongers, as well as doctors, software developers and engineers. The more we funnel children into higher education, the greater the shortage in those first three categories we will face.

There are language requirements to be allowed to work or study in the UK, which were recently tightened to align with European protocols. English must be good enough to use public transport and perform daily routines, such as shopping. It’s not required that students or workers can hold academic or professional depth conversations.

There is also a language requirement for dependents. They must be able to introduce themselves. English exams are administered by five approved agencies in competition with each other. You can take the test in cities such as Mumbai, Lahore, or Lagos. Most immigrant workers come from India, Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Skilled workers can no longer be paid less than the going rate. That is a welcome and long overdue change. It was too easy to hire people from abroad, often on depressed wages, than to pay full price for British workers. Just writing that makes me wonder what those making the rules were trying to achieve.

Some argue Britons are lazy and won’t do the jobs that immigrants will. More to the point, we won’t do them for substandard wages, be held against our will, and with no benefits. We can’t do them if there is nowhere to live near work.

Demographics is Destiny

The challenge for Labour is to stay the course on immigration when it is under fire for becoming right wing. Perhaps only a left wing party has the cover to introduce sensible reforms. The UK needs immigrants, but cannot have open borders and accept all asylum seekers, while maintaining a welfare system, free healthcare, and a four million plus shortage of housing.

Demographics is destiny. We are ageing and there is no graceful way to go. Close the borders and we decay quickly. Open them and eventually we are overrun. A thousand societies have gone that way before.

Those societies tended to be defeated. Ours may be self-defeating. When the state takes care of us, we no longer need family. When we care only to consume, children compete with our personal needs.

The fierce resistance to the two-child benefit cap suggests the opposite, and that an absence of welfare is constraining families. Yet how many support the idea of larger families, rather than participating in them. Two thirds of the world’s population live in countries where births are below the replacement rate. Significant shifts in the make-up of domestic populations appear inevitable.

If you are feeling brave and know people with an open mind, why not share The Sniff Test with them.