The economic case for mass immigration is COLLAPSING
It shouldn't be controversial to suggest immigration is making us poorer
Listen to the expert class and they’ll tell you mass immigration
is good for Western economies. It’s driving growth, making us more
productive, making our societies more prosperous and improving living
standards. But this is a myth.
Mass
immigration —as a growing pile of evidence across Europe now shows— is
not good for Western economies. On the contrary, if you look past the
pro-immigration zealots masquerading as serious economists on Twitter
and engage with the actual evidence then you’ll soon realise that much
of the immigration flooding into the West is hollowing out our
economies, taking more out of them than it’s putting in.
Look at the UK. A couple of weeks ago, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) released a new report
on the country’s fiscal risks, concluding that the country’s finances
are on an unsustainable path. Over the next half-century, because of the
UK’s ageing society and climate risks, public spending is forecast to
rise from 45% to over 60% of GDP, with debt as a percentage of GDP
soaring to an eye-watering 274% in the coming decades. In short, we’re
heading for disaster unless something changes.
But
what was also interesting about this report is that, unlike what
usually happens, it did not point to mass immigration as the answer to
these problems. Why? Because even the technocrats at the OBR have
finally realised that the current model of mass immigration that we are
pursuing in the UK is weakening, not strengthening, the economy. In
short, the very kind of immigration that our hapless political elites on
both the Left and the Right have been encouraging since Brexit—low skill, low wage, non-selective immigration from outside Europe— is the most economically damaging.
For
a start, the OBR quietly notes that mass immigration is contributing to
what is known as ‘capital dilution’, or what I call ‘the population
trap’. This is what happens when populations expand so quickly that the
sheer scale and speed of this population change exceeds the capacity of
the state to provide its own citizens with functioning public services
—such as a functioning NHS and education system— as well as things like
affordable and available housing and safe neighbourhoods. Mass
immigration, in short, is managed decline because it’s putting enormous
pressure on a state that is already struggling to provide public
services for its existing population.
This
is what the Canadians, the Swedes, and many others are now finally
realising —that the sheer scale of demographic change over the last
twenty years or so has been so great that the state is now simply unable
to perform its most basic functions. And this is what is now happening
in the UK —even if much of the elite class ignore it.
Since
1997, net migration added nearly 6 million people to the country, with
close to 4 million arriving since 2010 under Conservative-led
governments, the most pro-immigration governments in history. In 2022
and 2023 alone, more than 2.4 million people migrated into the UK. But
at the same time growth has remained low, productivity and wage growth
have stagnated, and the country has recorded the worst GDP-per-capita
figures since the 1970s. Where is the booming, dynamic, innovative,
prosperous economy that the pro-immigration lobby promised us would
arrive?
Look
around at the NHS, our education system, and infrastructure and it’s
already crystal clear to many that these changes are imposing other
costs. As the OBR notes in typically technocratic lingo, the sheer scale
of this migration is diluting what it calls ‘the public capital stock
per person’. In other words, the British people and their children are
now being pushed by incompetent elites into a big debt, big state, big
spending, big tax society that will increasingly be defined by masses of
immigration from outside Europe and even worse public services than we
have now.
Some of these costs have already been tracked. One think-tank, Oxford Economics, estimates
that the very kind of mass immigration from outside Europe that the old
parties are now imposing on the rest of us has cost the UK economy
somewhere around £9 billion. In housing, too, we already know that mass
immigration is driving up house prices and rents, requiring the UK,
which built only 180,000 homes last year, to build some 550,000 homes
each year if it is to keep up with the demand from immigration, in turn
making it harder for British families, workers, and young people to get
onto the housing ladder. As I’ve said before, you can have available and
affordable housing for British families or mass immigration. You can’t
have both.
Then
come the less visible but still significant costs to the public purse
—like the fact nearly 2 million state school pupils do not speak English
as their first language, that immigrants made 7 million
new GP registrations between 2010 and 2022, that our broken asylum
system cost us at least £7 billion a year, and that immigrants are
disproportionately more likely
to be arrested —all costs that you are not supposed to discuss or
mention in polite society but which you, the taxpayer, are still forced
to pay each year while being told this model of mass immigration is
actually good for you.
But
surely the economic contribution that immigration is making outstrips
these costs, right? Nope. As I’ve been arguing for years, the OBR has
finally looked at the fiscal impact of different types of immigration
into Britain and concluded that the very kind of low-skill, low-wage
migration that our hapless politicians in Westminster are now
encouraging is a net fiscal cost, not benefit, to the economy and
taxpayers.
As
the OBR analysis finds, an average low-wage migrant costs the taxpayer
about £150,000 by the time they reach 60, about £465,000 by the time
they reach their 80s and about £1 million if they live to 100. The OBR
also find that tweaking different kinds of migration makes little
difference to our country’s growing debt problem. In short, mass
immigration is simply not the panacea the expert class want you to think
it is.
And
the OBR find this while suffering from big problems. They make some
truly bizarre calculations, like assuming immigrants have no children
and dependents and while completely disregarding things like the fiscal
cost of immigration on housing, education, and crime —which have been shown to be significant.
And
here’s something else that many people in Westminster don’t want you to
know —it’s the same story in other economies across the West. Just as
evidence in the UK is starting to show, many studies in Europe, which
are based on MUCH more granular data than we have in the UK, are finding
that mass immigration is undermining, not strengthening, economic
prosperity in the West.
One
massive problem in the UK —which I’ve been talking about in recent
months— is that while we know in broad terms that mass immigration is
now making us poorer we also do not have the very granular data on
things like welfare claims, taxation, and criminality by nationality and
immigration status that are available in other countries and would
allow us to paint an even more detailed picture of what’s going on.
Why? Because the state and civil servants very clearly want to keep this data hidden
from you, the taxpayer, or they are so incompetent they are not
collecting it in the first place. You’re being forced, in other words,
to pay for the costs of this political project while the state
simultaneously refuses to show you data on the impact immigration is
having on your economy, welfare state, NHS, prison sentence, and more,
and then being called a racist or misinformed lemming if you ask
questions. It’s unbelievable.
But
other countries HAVE been collecting and crunching this data and they
find a very consistent and alarming story. In recent years, research in Denmark, Sweden, Germany
and other countries that we’ll come to has converged on the same point:
mass immigration, though especially low-wage, low-skill, and
non-European migration from the Middle East and Northern Africa
—precisely the kind that’s now flooding into Europe and the UK—is a net
fiscal cost to economies in Europe. It’s hollowing them out from the
inside and eroding their welfare states.
One of the most detailed studies, the Borderless Welfare State,
at the University of Amsterdam, paints a striking and bleak picture.
It’s based on incredibly detailed and reliable data on individuals in
the population. What did it find? It found clear and overwhelming
evidence that much of the immigration that’s flooding into the country
is undermining the welfare state and imposing big costs on the economy.
Why?
Because much of the immigration into the Netherlands, like much of the
immigration into the UK, is being driven by less well educated
immigrants who cling to the welfare state and take more out of it than
they put in.
As
Jan van der Beek’s research shows, the share of poorly educated people
in the 25-65 age group among non-European immigrants (34%) is twice as
high as among the native Dutch (17%). And because the poorly-educated
are more likely to rely on welfare this is increasing the proportion of
net recipients in the population, upsetting the balance. This is exactly
why Milton Friedman said: ‘You cannot simultaneously have free
immigration and a welfare state’. It’s also why other scholars warn mass
immigration erodes social trust and support for welfare —not least as
the native population begin to realise they are merely subsidising
outsiders from very different cultures who often hate who they are and
are a net fiscal drain on the economy.
As
Jan van der Beek also finds, while poorly-educated immigrants are a net
fiscal cost on Western economies, so too are migrants who are moving
into the West to join family members, study, or seek asylum (as many in
the UK are doing). In the UK, for example, while people often assume
that international students are affluent PhD students from Chile the
reality is quite different. More than 40% of graduate visa holders in
the UK earn less than £15,000 a year, with many ending up servicing the
low-wage, low-skill Deliveroo economy. Only migrants who are moving for
work make a net contribution although even then the pattern is mixed. As
van der Beek finds, whereas labour migrants from North America, Oceania
and Japan bring a net fiscal gain to the economy of some £670,000,
asylum migrants from Africa, like many of those arriving in the UK, cost
the Dutch a net cost of £685,000 per migrant.
Family and asylum migration is especially costly (which has also been found in Belgium).
In fact, in the Netherlands it’s estimated that granting one asylum
request to one migrant costs Dutch taxpayers about £1.1 million —to
cover the asylum-seeking migrant, their family members, and the impact
of the second generation.
There
are also enormous differences according to where migrant workers come
from. On average, migrant workers from Africa, the Middle east, and
Central and Eastern Europe are a net fiscal drain. Their education and
income is low, making them, on average, net recipients of the welfare
state. This is aggravated by higher rates of family-related migration
that come with labour migration, which doubles the cost.
One
example are low-skilled, guest-worker migrants from Morocco and Turkey
who have grown from 55,000 in the 1970s to 935,000 since. In 2016, in
the Netherlands, these guest-workers and their descendants were net
fiscal recipients of an astonishing £8 billion
–equivalent to 2.5% of all government spending—which is even more
striking given they tend to be younger and in theory should be net
contributors.
The
most costly forms of migration are asylum-seekers from the Middle East
and Northern Africa. This is in line with findings from the Danish Ministry of Finance,
who also single out the so-called ‘MENAPT’ region (Middle East, North
Africa, Pakistan and Turkey) as the region that is associated with the
biggest fiscal costs to Western economies and brings the biggest
problems with integration.
Research
in Finland, too, also shows that immigrants from “the greater Middle
East” - a region that includes the Middle East, Central Asia, Pakistan,
North Africa and countries such as Sudan and Somalia - have by far the
greatest negative fiscal impact in Finland. Calculations for Belgium, likewise, confirm this.
In
other words, while the costs of mass immigration to the UK are finally
starting to emerge in the research, if you look at far more detailed and
reliable studies elsewhere in Europe they tell a consistent and
worrying story. It is exactly the kind of low-wage, low-skill,
low-educated, and non-European forms of immigration that the UK is now
welcoming with open arms, much of it from places like the Middle East
and Northern Africa, that is precisely the most financially costly and
most likely to erode rather than bolster our national prosperity.
Ordinarily,
were we living in some other galaxy, then you might expect our
politicians and policymakers to know all this and act accordingly,
perhaps by completely changing gear and delivering the kind of
high-skill and lower levels of immigration they promised the British
people during Brexit referendum and its aftermath.
But,
instead, they appear to have their fingers in their ears, screaming at
anybody who dares to point all this out while leading us all into
managed decline. And there are very good reasons to expect this to get a
lot worse. Just look at how the UK’s population is forecast to grow in
the years and decades ahead.
Our already rapidly expanding population is forecast to surge by another 6.5 million
people by the year 2036, equivalent to adding another city
three-quarters the size of London to the country, and by another 14
million by the year 2074, equivalent to about twelve cities the size of
Birmingham. And almost all of this will be driven by immigration —with
much of it being low-skill, low-wage, family-related, and student
migration from outside the European Union. If the state can barely
manage to cope with the current record levels of immigration then what
is going to happen over the next fifty years, as these kinds of more
costly migration continue to soar?
Increasingly,
in other words, our politicians and the morally righteous new elite are
pushing us into managed decline by embracing the very model of
low-wage, low-skill, non-European immigration that is bad economics and
has consistently been shown to be the most likely model of immigration
to leave us all worse off. The economic case for the kind of mass
immigration that we are currently encouraging is now visibly falling
apart around us while the elite class put their fingers in their ears,
berating anybody who dares point this out as a misinformed bigot. But,
actually, it is they who are misinformed. And as usual, it will be the
British taxpayer and their children who will be forced pay the price for
their failures of their hapless and incompetent elites.
