Boris Johnson has made his mark on British history. As a result of his brief tenure as prime minister, Britain is now undergoing its most significant period of demographic change since the Anglo-Saxon migration. 

Yesterday’s ONS statistics — showing net immigration figures of 672,000 for 2023, as well as its upward revision of 2022 figures to 745,000 — are entirely unprecedented. The gross figures, revealing that 1.2 million people entered Britain last year, are now equivalent in absolute numbers to the turn-of-the-century immigration wave that transformed America’s demographics. This led to a 40-year restrictionist policy geared towards allowing that far larger and more populous country to integrate its diverse new population. As a surely unintended result of Brexit, the majority of Britain’s new population wave now comes from outside Europe: indeed, this year more migrants came from Nigeria alone than from the entire European Union.

Until recently, conservatives were wont to observe that New Labour’s immigration maximalism transformed Britain. As just one result, London’s ethnic British population fell from 80% in 1991 to less than 37% today, a statistic with few parallels in world history. But the Conservative Party’s devotion to mass migration dwarfs Tony Blair’s efforts, and the results will be even more transformative.