Britain’s new Prime Minister has ditched a decade-long commitment to bring immigration down to manageable levels and is talking up an amnesty for illegal migrants, major policy changes that will likely be near-ignored in preference to the important topic of Brexit.
And while Brexit is without doubt the most important political issue of our generation, the long-overlooked task of finally fixing the United Kingdom’s broken immigration system remains a high priority for voters.
Yet Boris’s plan is akin to Angela Merkel throwing the doors of Europe open in that mad summer of 2015, naturally without consulting with the people of Europe if they wanted a few million new neighbours, in its arrogance and misjudgement. The Prime Minister signalling to people-smugglers and illegal migrants that their crimes will be overlooked if they can remain undetected long enough is nothing short of an open invitation for more illegals to come and try their luck.
How many people could such an amnesty mean giving papers to? Newspapers like The Sun bandied figures like 500,000 around in the wake of Johnson’s comments, but this seems optimistically low for the amount of new British citizens or regularised residents the Prime Minister might wave into existence with the stroke of a pen. As Breitbart London’s flashback on Johnson’s past form on calling for illegal amnesties points out, Boris was putting the figure at 400,000 ten years ago for greater London alone when calling for amnesty as Mayor.
A decade of porous borders to London and the rest of the nation suggests the true figure is much higher, and the experts agree. Former Home Office immigration enforcement boss David Wood put the figure at 1.2 million in 2017, and claimed the true levels of migration to the United Kingdom were kept secret to save the government embarrassment. New arrivals of illegals is estimated to run at 150,000 a year, every year.
And then there’s chain migration, a factor well known in the United States but less understood in the United Kingdom and Europe.
As Breitbart London’s James Delingpole has already noted, perhaps the greatest threat to Boris Johnson’s leadership is his deep-seated desire to be liked. But if Boris thinks he can buy the love of the BBC and the Twittersphere by giving out a million British passports, he’ll be sorely disappointed.
Mr Johnson, you’ve already been — quite wrongly, for obvious reasons — labelled Britain’s Trump by the mainstream media. It doesn’t matter how liberal your views on borders are, or how many citizenships you give out, you’re always going to be the bad guy to the news anchors and Westminster bubble. Chasing that popularity means doing the work of the left for them, without them ever needing to win another election.