Migration Watch UK: News

Nearly two-thirds of asylum seekers turned out to be bogus - but Britain ended up with £10 billion bill anyway, says report 24 August, 2011

The UK’s asylum system has been costing taxpayers on average more than £2 million a day since 1999 and, once anyone has set foot on British soil, they have a 77% chance of staying – whatever the merits of their case

That is the conclusion of a study by think-tank Migration Watch UK of the outcome of the asylum system over the period 1997 - 2010 published today in advance of the latest statistics due on 25 August.

The study found that only a quarter of those who sought asylum in the UK between 1997 and 2010 were granted asylum, including those granted on appeal. A further one in seven were granted other forms of protection so 60% were eventually refused altogether.

Of those refused only just over one third were removed with the result that anyone claiming asylum in Britain had a 77% chance of staying here - more often than not illegally. The study also found that, in recent years, the majority of applications (59%) were lodged only after the applicant had been detected.

The cost to the tax payer, including the cost of legal aid and the cost of the immigration courts was close to £10 billion or nearly £2.3 million a day over the period.

The proportion of asylum seekers granted protection in France was found to be significantly lower than in the UK.

Said Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK: ‘The asylum system has proved to be a £10 billion shambles. Those who, like ourselves, are serious about protecting genuine refugees should be no less serious about removing bogus claimants and, better still, deterring them in the first place.  The system needs to be much faster. Delays in the system leave the door open for appeals based on the right to family life without any consideration for the rights of society in general’

‘It also needed to be much tougher on the bogus. It is absurd, for example, that we should allow people who have been in Britain illegally for years to claim asylum so as to delay or prevent their removal; this now applies to almost 60% of claimants.

‘It is a pity that the lawyers have been so remarkably silent all these years. The failure of the UK Border Agency to implement the decisions of the immigration appeal courts reduces their activities to a charade and brings the rule of law into disrepute,’ he said.

A Guide to Recent Research on the Economic Impact of Immigration on the UK

Migration Watch UK published on 26 July a summary guide (Briefing Paper No 1.29) to the latest research. It covers:

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head

Employment

Wages

Budgetary impact

And includes useful quotes (and urls) from:

The House of Lords

Migration Advisory Committee (MAC)

National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR)

Office for National Statistics (ONS)

Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)

It is intended as a useful reference document for those with a serious interest in the subject.

Cap on Economic Migration Will Have a Limited Effect

The Government’s cap on economic migration which comes into effect on 6 April will have only a limited effect on net migration in the medium term but it could become a barrier against future increases in economic migration. That is the conclusion of a paper published today by Migrationwatch.

Immigration Under Labour – Chaos or Conspiracy?

Figures due out on Thursday will, for the first time, officially confirm that net foreign immigration under Labour exceeded three million.

This is the context for a detailed indictment of the Labour Government’s record on immigration published today in Briefing Paper No 11.24. It forensically examines one of the most significant and far reaching changes ever imposed on the fabric of Britain - despite the wishes of the vast majority of its citizens.

The document, ‘Immigration – Labour’s enduring legacy to Britain’ - from think-tank Migration Watch, has brought together the principal facts and figures resulting from the largest wave of immigration for nearly a thousand years.

Migration Watch was one of the few voices consistently raised in opposition to mass immigration during the Blair and Brown years and was regularly vilified by Labour politicians and the immigration lobby.

Now we find that, as the Labour supporting Institute of Public Policy Research recently put it; “It is no exaggeration to say that immigration under New Labour has changed the face of the country.”

‘We would agree, the sheer scale of what has occurred is changing Britain fundamentally and irrevocably and in ways the majority of the population did not ask for, were not consulted about and did not wish to see,’ said Migration Watch chairman, Sir Andrew Green. ‘Urgent action is needed to place firm limits on any further immigration’

The report shows that in the years before Blair’s government net immigration was running at around 50,000 a year, but in 1997 the floodgates were opened and numbers quadrupled with the result that over three million migrants came to Britain and stayed here plus, perhaps, a further one million who came and stayed illegally. At the same time nearly a million British citizens left the country.

This is in sharp contrast to Labour’s 1997 election manifesto which declared that “Every country must have firm control over immigration and Britain is no exception.”

‘This has been a clear failure of democracy due in large part to the left’s deliberate tactic of stifling reasoned debate with accusations of racism,’ said Sir Andrew, ‘ In the years to come immigration will be seen as Labour’s great betrayal.’

He added that the raw statistics were difficult to envisage.

‘But when you consider that three million extra people on this island equates to the creation of three cities the size of Birmingham, seven the size of Manchester or 20 the size of Harrogate with all that that means for the pressure on our roads, railways, housing, infrastructure, the environment, schools, hospitals and the general quality of life it gives some idea of the scale of what Labour has bequeathed to us all.’

Some of the key headlines from the report are:

• nearly a migrant a minute now arrives in Britain
• Of the 3.2 million immigrants who have come to the UK some 80% came from outside the EU.
• the UK population is heading for 70 million in twenty years time, 68% of the increase will be due to immigration
• since 1997 75% of the extra jobs created went to foreign born workers
• over one third of new households will be a result of immigration, requiring 330 new homes every working day for the next 23 years
• waiting lists for social housing in England have risen by 70% since 2001
• children born to a foreign mother almost doubled to 25%
• an extra 500,000 children arrived in our primary schools; a similar number do not have English as their first language
• the number of migrants has increased under Labour’s new Points Based System.  In 2009, economic migration fell by 27,000, helped by a major recession, but students increased by 43,000.
• Research by one of the country’s leading demographers has concluded that if immigration continues at its present level the ‘white British’ may become a minority in the UK by the late 2060s.

Said Sir Andrew: ‘Immigration on a sensible scale has clear benefits but only if it is both properly controlled and limited in scale. It is still not entirely clear whether the outcome of the Labour years was a result of gross incompetence or some politically motivated desire to change the whole nature of our society. Policy might also have been influenced by the fact that many immigrants become Labour voters.

‘The present government will have to stick to their guns if they are to clear up the shambles they inherited and get a grip of developments that could otherwise fundamentally change the whole nature of our society.

Note to Editors:

1 Mr Blair’s 690 page memoir has only one substantive page on immigration in which he describes his strategy for handling it at the 2005 election:  “Because our position was sophisticated enough – a sort of ‘confess and avoid’, as the lawyers say – we won out.” (page 524).

2 The IPPR quote is from “Immigration under Labour”, November 2010, page 4.

Briefing by the Mayor of London: Rebuttal

Back Bench Debate on Immigration: The Scale of immigration

The GLA Briefing claims (paragraph 4) that "net international migration in 2009 was at its lowest level since mid 1995 which is comparable to the government’s target". This is quite wrong. As the paper recognises elsewhere, net international migration in 2009 is estimated at 196,000; in 1995 it was 76,000. The central point is that the average over the past five years has been 200,000 while the ONS projection for 70 million in 20 years is based on the assumption that net migration will continue at 180,000.

The economic impact

The GLA claim that, “If numbers fall in line with government targets….there would be a negative impact of about -1% on GDP”. This is based on a Financial Times article of 18 June which is faulty for reasons fully explained in a Migrationwatch press release of 19 July. Briefly, their calculation assumed that, over a 5 year period, the growth of output would be entirely constrained by the growth of the population over the age of 16. However, with 2.5 million unemployed a shortage of labour is not the main constraint on output.

Furthermore, this claim ignores the point that what matters, as the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs pointed out, is GDP per head. There is nothing in the GLA briefing to suggest that this might fall.

Students

The corrected briefing claims that "80% of overseas students leave the UK within 5 years of entering".   In fact, the Home Office research to which they were referring found that 80% were "no longer in the system".  That is not to say that they had left the country.  There are still no records of departure. In fact, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that overstaying students are a significant part of net migration.

 To watch the debate of 18 November click here

Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis

TITLE PAGE AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY of a joint research study by the Home Office Economics and Resources Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit.

This document was given restricted circulation in October 2000 and was obtained by Migration Watch in January 2010 under a Freedom of Information Act request to the Cabinet Office.

(The full text which runs to 81 pages could presumably be obtained from the Cabinet Office).

See Migration Watch's full Press Release.

Immigration 'No Answer' to Pension Time Bomb

The ‘myth’ that continued mass immigration is the answer to Britain’s pensions time bomb has been described as ‘totally dishonest’ by a new report out today.

The report from think tank Migrationwatch, finds that the present ratio of workers to pensioners could only be sustained by immigration at a level that would bring the population of the UK to 119 million by 2051 and 303 million by the end of the century -obviously absurd propositions.

'The pensions myth is just one in a long series of excuses that are trotted out in support of justifying the highest levels of immigration in our history, and each time they are examined in detail they fall apart as this study demonstrates,’ said Migrationwatch chairman, Sir Andrew Green.

>The report reviews the prospects for this ratio - known as the Potential Support Ratio (PSR)in the light of the most recent population projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It finds that, with no migration at all the ratio would fall from today’s level of 4.15 to 1.9 in 2051. If net migration continues at 180,000 a year, as the ONS predicts, the PSR would drop to 2.4 in that year. However, this improvement in the support ratio would require a continuing conveyor belt of new immigrants resulting in an extra 13.6 million people with all that that implies in what is already one of the most crowded countries in Europe.

The report quotes four major studies which have dismissed this approach. Most recently, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs concluded that "arguments in favour of high immigration to defuse the "pensions time bomb" do not stand up to scrutiny…"

'The Government have been running this dishonest argument for years. They have recently shaded it to talk about "helping" with the pensions problem but the reality is that any significant impact requires a huge and continuing increase in our population. They know it is no answer to the pensions problem and it is time they levelled with the British public and dropped this absurd argument,’said Sir Andrew.

Huge Cost of Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Quantified

An amnesty for illegal immigrants would be bound to encourage further illegal immigration, their present number has been seriously underestimated and the lifetime cost would be in the order of £130 billion even on that low estimate of numbers, says a report out today from think-tank Migrationwatch.

The report is in reply to a paper published by the London School of Economics on 16 June in response to a request from London's Mayor. Introducing the document, Boris Johnson claimed it proved that immigrants were "far from a financial burden". He added:

    "This new Report has introduced some long overdue facts, hard evidence and academic rigour into a debate which has far too often been dominated by myth, anecdote and hearsay".

Clearly the Mayor had not read the Report which makes it clear that "It has to be emphasised that these are ball park estimates at best" (page 110) and that "many of the numbers that had been generated for this Report have required heroic assumptions" page 113).

The Mayor also claimed that:

   "So far from a financial burden, as some suggest, this new research has found an amnesty could be worth up to £3 billion a year to the country's economy."

What the Report actually says is:

"Neither the literature nor currently available UK data provides a quantitative basis from which one could at all reliably start to estimate the scale of effects on UK output which would be likely to follow from regularisation"(page 73).

The Report is, in fact, astonishingly thin on its claim of economic benefit - just two paragraphs in 125 pages. It goes on to take what is described as "an example". This gives, on the basis of four hypotheses, an expected increase in GDP of some £3 billion (page 73).

Migrationwatch have now examined this Report in detail and have found that:...

See Full Press Release

Surge in Remittances Points to Sharp Rise in Illegal Immigrants from Pakistan

The number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan in the UK could be as high as 200,000 according to a new report out today which has compared official statistics on the number of Pakistani born workers with a dramatic increase in the level of remittances being sent to that country.

An examination of workers remittances shows that they are now more than six times higher than in 2001 but, according to the Government’s Labour Force Survey, the number of Pakistani born workers in Britain has risen by only 67%, says the report (Briefing Paper 1.24) from think tank Migrationwatch…

See the full press release

Migrationwatch Migrationwatch comment on GLA report on illegal immigration issued on 16 June, 2009.

'These are very expensive proposals which would only make a bad situation worse. On the report’s own figures they would cost £300m in bureaucracy and £3m a week in benefits (our figure is £10m a week. See also Briefing Paper 11.11 - The True Cost of an Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants). It would also cost £6bn to provide the extra social housing needed.

Worse still, it would encourage still further illegal immigration as other countries have found. Italy has granted five amnesties in the last twenty years and Spain six; on virtually every occasion there were more applications each time. The report has no answer to this. it just remarks that it would only happen if border controls were ineffective.

But that is exactly the position we still face. We issue two million visas a year and there will be no full checks on departure until 2014, obviously, those granted an amnesty would be replaced at the drop of a hat.

The public have the common sense to see this. Our opinion poll showed seventy per cent opposed to an amnesty.

The recent European elections must surely be a lesson to the political class that they can no longer ride roughshod over public opinion with absurd, expensive and self-defeating proposals such as these. It seems that Boris Johnson is trying to buy the immigrant vote with taxpayer's money. They will know how to respond to this.'