Report on immigrant cost ‘flawed’

IMMIGRANTS HAVE cost UK taxpayers more than £22 million a day over the past 17 years, a report has claimed.

Migration Watch UK research claims that the public purse was £140 billion worse off between 1995 and 2011 as a result of people moving to Britain.

It follows work by the University College London’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (Cream) last year that showed immigrants had made a “substantial” contribution to public finances since 2000 and those from the European Economic Area (EEA) had paid 34% more in taxes than they received in benefits in the decade up to 2011.

MigrationWatch UK said it had followed the methodology used by Cream but had changed what it called the “unrealistic assumptions” that had been made in that study, such as suggestions that EEA migrants are only half as likely to claim benefits or tax credits — something it claimed was “highly misleading”.

Its report states that findings about the contributions made by EEA migrants are “simply wrong” and rely “on assumptions that employees earn the same as the UK-born population”.

“Infact, on less unreasonable assumptions, there was no positive fiscal impact at all from the recent EEA migrant group singled out ... for their ‘very positive contribution’,” it states. “Indeed, migration to the UK continues to have a significant fiscal cost, and recent migrants made no difference to the upward trend.”

Cream has strenuously dismissed the claims, insisting the thinktank’s work is “based on a serious misinterpretation of the methodology we have used in our work”.