There are few more inconvenient truths in modern Britain than the failure of mass migration. We wanted to believe the myth, that we could fling open our doors and into the UK would flow migrants from across the globe, transforming our nation into a prosperous melting pot. But wishing it so was not enough, and with each new dataset the economic miracle looks more and more like a mirage.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) recently showed that a “low-wage migrant” who comes to Britain aged 25 will cost the taxpayer £150,000 net by the time they reach 66, £438,000 by 80, and £1.2 million if they live to 100. That we’ve recently experienced the worst GDP per capita growth since the 1970s suggests immigration does not magically boost living standards. In 2023 net migration totalled 685,000, yet still we are plagued by flatlining productivity, a fiscal squeeze, a ballooning welfare bill and stagnant growth. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just revealed GDP per head shrank by 0.3 per cent between April and June compared with a year earlier.
And that’s before you get to what the OBR refers to as “dilution of capital stock”: how the rate of immigration far exceeds the ability of our state to adapt. So we have a decaying NHS, clogged up roads, crumbling infrastructure. And it’ll only get worse: in the 27 years since 1997, net migration added six million people to the country. In the next 13 years, we could easily add half that number again.
But here’s the thing about awkward truths: people will go to great lengths to cover them up. In fact, there’s good evidence this is happening already, with former immigration minister Robert Jenrick warning this week that migrant crime statistics are being hidden from the British public. We cannot have a serious discussion about immigration without the data. Denmark has league tables compiled from government figures showing the crime rates of the top four nations – Kuwait, Tunisia, Lebanon and Somalia – are eight times those of Danish nationals. We have a ruling class who are either too incompetent, or too reluctant, to tell the people paying for this political project what it’s really costing. What we do know is that 12 per cent of our prison population is currently foreign born. Will we remove them? Fat chance: Britain couldn’t even boot out Rochdale grooming gang ringleader Qari Abdul Rauf, even after he was ordered to be deported by a judge nearly a decade ago.
As Neil O’Brien MP has pointed out, sensible countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and so on all do a much better job than the UK of measuring the net tax contribution of different groups of migrants. In the UK the data is frustratingly patchy and limited. The ONS is becoming a national embarrassment – first it allowed trans extremism to contaminate the latest census and now it is complaining that it’s too difficult or costly to dig out information on migrants. HMRC used to publish data on the amount of tax paid by nationality, but this has been discontinued.
This obfuscation confuses what is really happening in our society. Left-wing charities churn out publications on our “widening inequality”. But we know that migrant incomes are bimodal – many will be on low incomes, but significant numbers will be seriously well-off people, as rich lists illustrate. Large-scale migration stretches the income distribution and gives the impression of greater unevenness, validating demands that we take more from the wealthy to give to the poor.
The elites expect everyone to swallow the idea that everything is fine. That mass migration is an unalloyed good, and unrelated to such issues as our chronic housing crisis.
The trouble is, people no longer believe that everything is fine. They want the nation to welcome genuine asylum seekers whose survival depends on our compassion. They want our doors open to the best and brightest. What they don’t want is for Britain to open its welfare state to the world.
European politics is shifting before our very eyes. British policymakers should view the rising support for the AfD in Germany, Geert Wilders’s triumph in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party’s parliamentary election victory in Austria, as a portent of what is to come. If they continue to cover their ears and denounce those who raise concerns over mass migration as bigots, they may find themselves marooned by the rising tide of Right-wing populism.
The full, alarming truth about mass migration is finally being exposed
Robert Jenrick is right – the risks have become so great they should be impossible to ignore