Robert Henderson
The politically correct never cease to tell us that mass immigration is a net benefit to Britain. By this they mean that immigrants pay more in taxes than they cost in publicly funded services. To make such an assessment the following statistics would be needed:
1. The amount of income tax and National Insurance paid by immigrants. Because of the type of work involved – seasonal, work offered by foreign gangmasters and so on – it is reasonable to assume a disproportionately large proportion of those working in the black market are immigrants. There is also a practice of immigrants working and paying tax until they exceed the single person’s tax allowance in a tax year, ceasing to work in the UK for that tax year and then reclaiming all the income tax paid at the end of the tax year. That rebated tax needs to be deducted from the tax paid figure held by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
2. The costs arising from the native population who are denied jobs which immigrants have taken. This will involve the benefits native workers have to collect because they cannot find a job, the costs of having to move to a new area to either seek work or because the new benefits cap will not meet their rent and the costs of having to take children out of one school plus the costs of registering with a new GP because a family is forced to move .
3. The cost to the native population of a reduction in wages caused by immigrants increasing the pool of labour. This will mean less tax paid and more in-work benefits
4. The cost of benefits drawn by immigrants when they are not working.
5. The cost of benefits drawn by immigrants when they are working, for example, working tax credits, housing benefit.
6. The cost of NHS care given to immigrants.
7. The cost of education given to immigrants, this to include the additional costs arising from those with poor or non-existent English.
8. The cost of benefits, education and NHS care for the children of immigrants born in the UK.
9. The costs of benefits paid to immigrants to support children born abroad and living abroad.
10. The inflation of housing costs caused by immigrants and their children born in the UK increasing the demand for housing.
11. The costs involved in a decline in the quality of NHS care and educational standards because of the pressure placed on the NHS, schools and higher education by immigrants. The inadequate English of many immigrants employed in the NHS in particular must reduce the efficiency of the service and increase the likelihood of error. The difficulty of teaching in schools with huge numbers of pupils lacking English as a first language speaks for itself.
12. The costs involved in the British economy generally from a loss of efficiency through the inadequate English of immigrants and their lack of understanding of British customs. It may be cheaper for an employer to employ an immigrant in terms of wages, but, especially where the immigrant is dealing with the public, there must be a substantial the loss of efficiency in terms of extra time taken to conduct conversations with customers, misunderstandings of what is wanted and an inability to explain to customers what is on offer.
13. The loss of expertise to Britain of skilled Britons who seek work abroad because of opportunities the UK being blocked by immigrants, for example, newly qualified British doctors and nurses have encountered difficulty in obtaining British posts despite the frequent claims of NHS staff shortages (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9272640/New-doctors-will-face-unemployment.html), while positions at British medical schools are cut and large numbers of foreigners recruited (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2407585/NHS-recruits-thousands-doctors-Third-World–limits-places-deny-British-students-chance-study-medicine.html)
14. The costs – which can be lifelong – of the loss of work experience for Britons unable to get work at all, whether skilled or unskilled. This is particularly important for the young.
15. The costs in terms of wear and tear on the roads because of increased traffic arising from immigrants.
16. The cost of criminal activity amongst immigrants.
17. The cost of criminal activity amongst the descendants of immigrants.
18. The costs of guarding against Islamic terrorism.
19. The costs of the remittances made by immigrants and their descendants to their ancestral countries.
20. The costs of meeting the requirements of the “anti-racist” legislation which puts considerable burdens employers. These are particularly severe for any employer who is funded in whole or part by the taxpayer. Such employers have to not merely be non-discriminatory, but they have to prove that is what they are as a result of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/34/pdfs/ukpga_20000034_en.pdf). The police are particularly keen to show how PC they are (http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/edhr/2010/201001EDHREDH01.pdf)
21. The cost of dealing with visa requests, asylum claims, claims regarding family reunions and claims based on compassionate grounds. The costs include employing civil servants to process claims to stay in the UK, the cost of staffing of immigration tribunals, the costs arising from the court time taken by the cases which go to the courts, the legal costs of those trying to stay in the UK (which are normally paid by the taxpayer), the cost of running immigration detention centres and the cost of removing people from the UK .
22. The ongoing cost of the descendants of immigrants – potentially through many generations – of racial and ethnic groups who continue to display high levels of unemployment, high benefit dependency, low-skills, poor educational attainment, low payments of tax and abnormally high levels of criminality.
I defy anyone to find a piece of research which comes close to including all those costs or even a majority of them.
Of course the economic arguments are not the most important thing about mass immigration which is that it changes the nature of a society because immigrants arriving in large numbers from the same country will invariably colonise parts of the country and resist assimilation. Nonetheless, it is important to thoroughly examine the weaknesses in the economic claims made by the politically correct because it is their favoured ploy to try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.
The costs fall most heavily on the poor, the rich being, as yet, largely untouched because they arrange their lives so that they do not encounter the supposed joy of diversity and have no need to seek work in a competitive situation.
