The U.K. Tried to Clamp Down on Migration—and Wound Up With an Unprecedented Wave

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Aug. 27, 2025 | Max Colchester and David Luhnow, Photographs by Dominic Whisson

[NFHale]

The way you “clamp down on illegal immigration” is to blow the damn boat out of the water before it comes to your shore.

[BradyLS]

After Brexit, the U.K. government of then Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson embarked on a new migration experiment. It slammed the door on European immigration only to open it to the rest of the world. The idea was to goose a sluggish economy by attracting the planet’s best and brightest people.

The Tories, despite repeatedly promising lower overall immigration levels, soon lost control of the system they designed, triggering the biggest influx of legal migration the country has ever seen. In just one job field, care aides who look after the infirm or elderly, one government forecast assumed some 6,000 migrants a year would come to work. In the space of four years, 679,900 carers and their families arrived, government figures show.

😳😑🙄

[Petrosius]

In just one job field, care aides who look after the infirm or elderly, one government forecast assumed some 6,000 migrants a year would come to work. In the space of four years, 679,900 carers and their families arrived, government figures show.

That is not a mistake; its a plan.

[kiryandil]

Up the young Queen of Scots!

[chopperk]

Its over for the UK now that the muslims have the vote. Sad to see their beautiful culture expire.

[ClearCase_guy]

[fuzzylogic]

hmmm...it’s actually just getting started. Finally.

Sept. 13th.

[logi_cal869]

[Cronos]

I lived in the south of England from 2000 to 2005. I was utterly disappointed that the famed English culture was already dead then.

In my travels around the country I gauged that it died somewhere around the end of the 70s. It was replaced by Crude, older (pre 2700s) English culture as the “gin soaked isle ), but without Christianity. And that too, by the 2000s became emptiness.

In 2000 I met many folks below 30 who had never stepped I side a church, knew nothing if British or English history and were under educated.

I’ve also noted the same destb of culture in Belgium, in Paris and in Copenhagen. Rural France and surprisingly the Netherlands outside Amsterdam are still attuned to the local culture.

And of course italy, Spain, Portugal are still tied to their culture

[Cronos]

Wonder what would have happened if the Scottish referendum to leave the UK, back in 2015, would have succeeded

[MinorityRepublican]

I lived in the south of England from 2000 to 2005. I was utterly disappointed that the famed English culture was already dead then.

In my travels around the country I gauged that it died somewhere around the end of the 70s.

I haven't been to Britain. But my guess is due to the end of the British Empire after WWII.

So it stopped being British when Churchill was no longer the PM.

[mass55th]

They obviously didn’t try very hard.

[joshua c]

is there a british navy?

[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

Fomr the article title -- "The U.K. Tried to Clamp Down on Migration...."

No, succeeding governments -- Labour and Tory alike -- did NOT.

Beginning an article with an outright lie seems so Wall Street Journal these days.

[Mr Radical]

The U.K. Tried to Clamp Down on Migration—and Wound Up With an Unprecedented Wave

Therein lays part of the problem:
No British government has ever tried to clamp-down on immigration. The government lies and lies again; and the MSM supports them with lies and more lies. And a majority of the natives seem content to just go along with whatever they are told.
(To think otherwise, of course, would be "racist".)

[Menes]

Just horrible to hear about this 😞

Is it true that there was even talk of not teaching Shakespeare in British schools any more? I hope I‘ve misunderstood…

Over here, many Germans still think of England as the country of beautiful old traditions, which have been erased elsewhere…

[Cronos]

Yes. It is true

[Menes]

Breaks my heart. The brave British people of WW2, who so valiantly fought against Nazism and for their country and their freedom, wouldn’t have wanted that either, I bet…there should have been a middle road, just like Britain in the Fifties.

[MinorityRepublican]

The brave British people of WW2, who so valiantly fought against Nazism and for their country and their freedom

They fought the Nazis because they didn't want to speak German lol