Letting in, or allowing to stay, everyone coming illegally without proper scrutiny encourages more illegal immigration.

Me: And I bet they are queuing to become soldiers fighting Russia, for England too.

The great England migration news blackout

By

Alp Mehmet

September 16, 2024

HOW many prisoners in our jails entered the UK illegally? Are people from certain countries more likely to end up behind bars than others? How much do migrants really cost the state and how much do they actually contribute?

You’d think we might have the answers to these basic questions. They are crucial for understanding the impact of immigration. But we don’t have them, because the Government refuses to publish the data.

As other European countries become more transparent on migration data, here in the UK, we’re moving in the opposite direction. It’s getting harder and harder to get the facts. The Department for Work and Pensions has quietly stopped releasing figures on how many migrants are claiming welfare. HMRC has cut off data showing how much tax migrants pay and how much they take back in tax credits.

The trend towards secrecy and obfuscation began in the twilight period of the previous government. But far from putting right a disservice to the public, Sir Keir Starmer’s government has doubled down on disguising or hiding the facts from us.

Take the cost of dealing with the illegal dinghy arrivals and the backlog of asylum applications; they are now granting asylum or allowing applicants to stay at pace and palming them off on local authorities. In doing this, they bury the costs within the overall welfare budget. How deceitful and sneaky is that? Soon, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will be boasting that she’s slashed asylum spending (currently an eye-watering £4billion a year).

Letting in, or allowing to stay, everyone coming illegally without proper scrutiny encourages more illegal immigration. The easier it is to enter and stay in the UK, the more people will try to come. Indeed, asylum grant rates have rocketed—from less than a third in 2004 to a staggering 80 per cent today. Those who don’t get granted asylum or leave to remain as often as not disappear into the black economy or get sucked into criminality. Meanwhile, the proportion of failed asylum seekers removed from the UK has plummeted. Ten years ago, a quarter of them were removed. Now the proportion is just 5 per cent – one in 20.

It is no wonder that illegal Channel-crossers are approaching 25,000 so far this year when you know that once you make it to the UK, you can pretty much stay here for good.

Since Labour took office, roughly 8,400 people have crossed the Channel illegally, about 137 a day. We need to have an honest conversation about the consequences. To do this the government must make the relevant data available and stop hiding information from us. This simply breeds mistrust and anger in the people who ultimately pay for it all.

As we at Migration Watch have long argued, overall net migration has been a net fiscal cost running into billions. Research, including our own, has consistently shown this. Last week, we learned from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), that low-paid (earning half the average annual UK wage of £35,000) migrant workers are a drain on the public purse from the moment they arrive, with each one costing taxpayers more than £150,000 by the time they reach state pension age. Those living to 80 will cost £500,000. And those making it to a hundred will cost the exchequer over £1million.

Professor David Miles of the OBR added that the wages migrants earn have a huge impact on Britain’s future debt. If every migrant worker earns 50 per cent less than the UK average, the national debt could balloon to 350 per cent of GDP by 2074. But if we focus on high-earning migrants, debt would rise to just 225 per cent of GDP.

This latest OBR report is a clear signal to the Government that cutting immigration and reducing net migration to below 100,000 per annum is an urgent imperative. We could begin by doing away with low-skill work visas. As we at MW have frequently argued over many years, low-skill, low-pay immigration is costly. Net migration numbers were high throughout the New Labour years, and exploded under the Conservatives, hitting a record 764,000 in 2022. 2023 saw this fall to 685,000. The trajectory may be downwards but it’s at snail’s pace. It remains at over six times where it needs to be if our population is not going to continue growing exponentially. Sir Keir Starmer, like his immediate predecessor, has voiced concern, and we hope he means it. Before the general election and during the campaign, he was saying that employers were ‘too reliant’ on cheap overseas labour. Despite this, Sir Keir and his Home Secretary have done very little to address runaway legal migration, and have regressed with tackling illegal immigration. If the Government doesn’t get a grip of illegal and legal immigration, including those coming for low-paid work, the financial hit will be catastrophic. Moreover, with net migration at even half the current rate, the population increase of some 9million people by mid/late 2040s will have devastating economic and social consequences.

TCW

Me: And I bet they are queuing to become soldiers fighting for England too.