Labour is hiding the immense costs of mass migration
How many of the people in our jails entered this country illegally? Are people from some countries more likely to get arrested in Britain than others? How much do we spend on welfare for people from different countries, and how much do they pay in tax?
We should be able to find an answer to all of these questions – but you can’t, because the Government won’t publish the data needed to draw conclusions. Indeed, answers to all questions about migration are getting harder to find.
While other governments around Europe are publishing more and more data on migration, in the UK we’re publishing less and less. The Department for Work and Pensions have stopped publishing the data on welfare claims by nationality which they used to publish for many years.
HMRC have stopped publishing data on the amount of tax paid and tax credits received by nationality. These decisions happened at the end of the last government, and I was critical at the time.
But the decision to hold back all this data has become more relevant, because Labour’s main approach to the small boats crisis is to hide the costs in the wider expenses of the welfare state.
This mindset extends to the Government’s handling of the asylum backlog, which in practice means granting more people asylum quickly. Just make people who came here illegally legal, and hey presto, problem solved. In a few years Labour will be able to boast that spending on the asylum system, currently £4 billion a year, is down, as the costs “disappear” into the wider welfare system where they will no longer be published.
In the real world, there are two problems with this strategy. First, waving more people through will increase the pull factor that causes so many people to enter the UK illegally. Asylum grant rates have steadily climbed over recent decades – from less than a third in 2004 to four fifths now. On top of that, many failed asylum seekers just vanish: the proportion of those who are ultimately removed has also dropped sharply over the last ten years. Previously, around a quarter of those who claimed asylum were returned, now it’s around one in twenty.
Some claimants are genuine. But many are really economic migrants or involved in criminality. At present the biggest group in the small boats are people from Vietnam, a peaceful and friendly country that people from the UK go on holiday to. Even so, the share of those asylum seekers coming from Vietnam who are returned has declined from about two thirds in the mid-noughties to just 1 per cent.
This is why people pay criminals to get in dangerous boats to come here: if you can make it to the UK, you’ll almost certainly be able to stay. Until that changes, the crossings will continue.
The second problem with the government’s plan is that in the real world the costs don’t go away. A number of local councils are very concerned that people are being shifted from asylum accommodation to presenting as statutory homeless and in need of social housing.
Just under half of all households in council housing in Greater London are already headed by people born overseas, and the share of new lets going to people who are not UK nationals is rising.
Of course, many refugees do work and also contribute in other ways. But refugees are often more likely to be destitute, and may not speak English. The group is four times more likely to be unemployed than people born here, and on average earn about half the amount per week that UK nationals do.
The British government refuses to calculate the impacts of this, but other countries do. A study at the University of Amsterdam calculated that, over a lifetime, the average net cost of an asylum migrant to the Dutch public is more than £400,000. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the British Government doesn’t want to publish such calculations, or even the information that would allow others to do so.
Since Labour came to power, roughly 8,400 people have come across the Channel – about 137 every day. That we cannot have an honest conversation about the consequences of this breeds huge mistrust. To avoid the problems we are seeing elsewhere in Europe, we need a new, transparent approach.