A strong resistance to mass immigration has built up in our country and the rest of Europe in recent years. You may think it unreasonable and you may think it ill informed but it’s a political fact which I doubt can be argued out of existence. “Europe”, the source of much conspicuous immigration to Britain in recent years, has become the lightning conductor but the electrical charge has other origins and they are something to do with culture, with race, with religion, with Islamist terrorism and with welfare dependency.
For those of us who are relaxed and even positive about the benefits of immigration, it’s worth a read. There is a mood about the people – the voting public – that needs to be understood. Its roots go deep and long as successive governments (of every stripe) have avoided making the case for the immigration they have enabled.
His data, taken from the Migration Advisory Committee’s recent report is interesting. I haven’t read the report to fully understand it, but:
Migration from the rest of Europe brings a big benefit to the British Exchequer. Migration from the rest of the world (which outnumbers European Economic Area migration) is a substantial cost. A small chart we printed illustrated this. The average contribution to UK public finances of migrants from the EEA in 2016/17 was £2,310. The equivalent for migrants from the rest of the world was minus £840. The equivalent for British adults overall was minus £70.
and…
The explanation is clear. The majority of rest-of-the-world migrants come from Asia, within which the Indian subcontinent is the largest component. The great majority of them are dependants: fiancées/fiancés, parents, carers and children brought in under our “family reunion” provisions: 53,000 in 2016, or a quarter of all non-EU immigration that year. These people are not lazy but have mostly come here for family reasons rather than to work. Many will be economically inactive and many will be poor. For cultural and religious reasons they will tend to keep themselves apart from the rest of Britain but be a charge upon the state.
Which is to say that it is not the geographic source of immigrants that creates the imbalance in contribution, but rather the reason for their coming.
Read the full column, here (registration required, I think).
Image: news.co.uk
