“Burnham is wrong: Brexit did not cause the Boriswave”, ran a headline in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday, as a noted barrister was given an op-ed to claim that widely held beliefs on migration were false.
The Boriswave is a term used – after being initially popularised by the online far right – to describe the large surge in legal immigration into the UK following Brexit and the introduction of Boris Johnson’s new points-based immigration system. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, net migration rose from around 224,000 in 2019 to over 600,000 in 2022 and more than 906,000 in 2023, representing an increase of 302%.
Many – including, to an extent, Andy Burnham – have attributed this to Brexit, but according to the lawyer Marina Wheeler, writing in Thursday’s Telegraph, that is completely unfair.
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“Mr Burnham is wrong,” writes Wheeler. “Leaving the EU restored the UK’s sovereign right to fix the rules and to make choices about legal migration. How we chose to exercise those repatriated powers is a separate matter.
“In the midst of a global pandemic, panic that the country was short of care workers fuelled the grant of visas, on the back of poor, out-of-date government data. Displaced Ukrainians and Hong Kongers also swelled the numbers.
Insisting that “because the surge came after Brexit, it does not mean Brexit caused it”, Wheeler adds that: “Since then, government has exercised its post-Brexit ability to control numbers and significantly restricted entry, among other things by limiting the right to bring dependents. By the end of 2025, net legal migration had fallen to 171,000.”
She concludes: “Not everyone agrees on these matters. Debate is the essence of democracy. But our chances of building durable policy rest on being able to explore the options, the choices and trade-offs, armed with better data, honest analysis and – crucially – without being dismissed as bigots.”
At the bottom of the article, the Telegraph adds: “Marina Wheeler KC is the author of A More Perfect Union: The Europe we Need, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2025 and now available in paperback.”
Alas, space constraints meant it was unable to tell its readers that between 1993 and 2020 – i.e. right through the Brexit period – Wheeler was also, er, Mrs Boris Johnson.
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