The Left can no longer hide from the terrible costs of mass migration

Far from benefiting the country, too many unskilled migrants are a net cost to other taxpayers

Source - Daily Telegraph - 13/09/24

Link 

In a recent interview to promote his latest book, Sir Tony Blair was good enough to admit that the influx of migrants under his premiership placed “strain” on communities. 

Net immigration increased fivefold under the last Labour government and his decade in power is widely regarded as having fired the starting gun on modern mass migration as we now know it. 

Defending his record in Downing Street, he accepted that opening up Britain’s borders did not come without cost, acknowledging: “This is true in certain communities, there was a big influx of people, it was causing real strains in some of those communities.”

But in the way only a prime minister who oversaw an unprecedented increase in migrant numbers (unprecedented, that is, until the last Tory government), he trotted out the tried and tested immigration “helped our economy” line, adding: “The truth is, we did need a lot of people for the British economy coming in from Europe.” 

We may have needed some people, but five times as many? 

At this juncture, most columnists would probably treat you to an explanation of the relationship between immigration and growth, complete with a debate over whether it is best to measure this as an increase in gross domestic product (GDP) or GDP per capita (per person). But I’m not going to do that, not least because even the country’s leading economists can’t seem to agree on which is the best measure to use. 

What’s clear, however, is that any measure of the economic impact of immigration must be long term, not short term, to give the electorate the most accurate picture of whether it is a net benefit or not. 

We also need to take account of the impact on the public finances of different types of migrants. 

Indeed, contrary to the claim, repeatedly bandied around by the Left, that all immigration is positive, figures produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) this week appear to vindicate the Right’s quest for quality over quantity.

According to the OBR, low-skilled migrants (defined as earning half the average wage) are actually a net cost to the state of more than £150,000 by the time they reach the state pension age, while high-skilled migrants (earning 30 per cent above the minimum wage) could expect to contribute a net £925,000 to the Treasury’s coffers until the same point in their lives. 

Even more worryingly, the cost of low-skilled migrants obviously grows after retirement. The OBR estimated the burden on the public purse increased to almost £500,000 if they lived to 80, and more than £1 million if they lived to 100. 

By contrast, the average British-born worker boosts the public finances by £280,000 by the time they reach 66, even adjusting for education and health spending before they start working in the first place. 

Meanwhile, skilled, high-earning migrants would “still be a net benefit to the public finances even if they lived to 100”, the OBR said in its latest fiscal risks report. 

With the UK national debt already close to eclipsing the size of the economy, the watchdog found that the wages of migrants made a “material difference” to Britain’s long-term debt trajectory. In a scenario where all migrants earn 50 per cent less than average in the UK, the stock of debt would rise to 350 per cent of GDP by 2074, the OBR said, instead of hitting 275 per cent. But if all migrants earned 30 per cent more than the domestic population, debt would only rise to 225 per cent of GDP over the same period.

So at last we have some much-needed clarity. And having deified the OBR, the Left is going to find it very difficult to argue with the figures. 

In the 17 years since Blair left office (and many millions of migrants later) we have been sold a narrative that we need to bring in large numbers of people in order to prop up the economy. Successive UK governments have allowed an influx of unskilled workers, arguing that they are required to plug low-paid vacancies that Brits are unwilling to fill. 

But the truth is that, while this may provide a short-term fix, in the long run, low-skilled migrants are likely to end up costing other taxpayers a fortune. 

As David Miles of the OBR pointed out, this new data supports the idea that the “characteristics of migrants, in terms of their earnings and how long they stay, are as important, if not more important, than the absolute numbers”. 

Which is why it is imperative that our points-based immigration system is applied more rigorously in selecting the migrants that we want and need, rather than continuing with what is effectively an everyone’s welcome approach. 

Britain is facing a twin storm beyond the need to attract the world’s best and brightest (which has not been helped by high taxes, a hostility towards wealth creation, and a declining quality of life). 

We already knew that we have millions of British people who either won’t do low-skilled work, like care or cleaning, or won’t work at all. 

Now we have discovered that the people we are bringing in to do this work are expected to be a drain on the public purse. 

It’s a disaster and one likely to get worse under Labour, with pro-immigration Starmer and his Cabinet having shown no desire whatsoever to get on top of both legal and illegal immigration. 

Indeed, Labour appears to want actively to hide the negative impact of migration by cutting back on the amount of nationality-specific data the Government publishes. The Department for Work and Pensions has stopped providing the data on welfare claims by nationality which they used to publish for many years. Meanwhile, HMRC has stopped publishing data on the amount of tax paid and tax credits received by nationality. 

But we cannot solve the foreign workers issue until we find an answer to the domestic one. Resolving our worklessness crisis requires as much, if not more, energy than “stopping the boats”. Not least because British people who are reliant on the state can end up costing taxpayers as heavily as those arriving here illegally. 

For years, Labour has blinded itself to the economic reality of mass migration by insisting that you can’t have too much of a good thing. But as ever in the world of Left-wing fantasy, the facts of the matter tell a very different story.