It’s worth mentioning that there are about half a million American, Canadian, New Zealanders and Australians living in the UK. That’s more than the number of asylum seekers we’ve had in a decade. Reform voters never mention this particular demographic. I wonder why?
Probably because the bulk of them of them are in the UK temporarily, either because they are doing that antipodean thing of decamping to Europe for a few years as young singles, before going back home, or because they've come to the UK to fulfil a specific job contract, usually a professional one. As an overall cohort they are generally well paid and will certainly be net contributors to our system rather than net beneficiaries, which is what it boils down to in the end. I'll hazard a guess that virtually none of them claim nor are eligible for any sorts of in or out of work benefits, UC or housing subsidies.
I'll also hazard a guess that virtually none of them arrive with several children and immediately go to the top of the council's priority for housing list.
Many will be here because they have dual citizenship and many will be here because they are married to Brits. But most importantly, they will all speak fluent English and be culturally similar to us, so they will be able to work, communicate, contribute, integrate from day 1.
Putting genuine asylum seekers aside for a second, we simply cannot afford to continue a system where it costs the country far more to have any newly arrived immigrant or economic migrant in it than if they were not here at all, all things considered. It's all very well coming up with figures that show that immigration overall apparently makes us richer, but how many ordinary people in this country feel rich compared to 20 or 30 years ago? Those figures include the contributions of rich investment bankers and other very highly paid professionals who buy houses and use private medical care and private education, as well as the (many more) minimum wage workers who make as much, if not more, in in-work benefits than they actually earn. Why do you think over 50% of Big Issue sellers are from the Roma community in eastern and central Europe? Do you honestly think that selling the Big Issue alone is so lucrative that they chose that over working full time in Sainsburys for example?
Saying that immigration has made us richer overall is a rather disengenuous exercise in smoke and mirrors and you really need to unpick the evidence for that. It's like looking at the average housing price in Poole in Dorset. It's completely skewed by the cost of houses in the very small and very exclusive enclave of Sandbanks. Poole is allegedly one of the most expensive areas in the whole country after London, to buy a house. But if you strip out the properties in Sandbanks and just look at the rest of Poole, suddenly it isn't quite as it first seems. The average value plummets and much of the local community is not at all affluent. The same is true of looking at the financial benefits of mass immigration.
We've become richer on the back of the gig economy for far too long, fed by a constant supply of cheap foreign labour. It's a house of cards where only a small cohort at the top actually feels the benefit. Ordinary people lower down in the pecking order certainly haven't benefitted. They can't see a doctor, can't get a house, can't get a secure job with a decent salary. They can't compete, so is it any wonder they give up and go on 'the sick' or refuse to work more than 16 hours a week? It simply doesn't pay for them to do otherwise and the system has been set up to enable them to do exactly that.
We've bred a whole generation of people who feel hopeless and helpless and yet lazy and entitled at the same time, and it's all been of our own doing. The rot started the day Tony Blair entered us into the Maastrict Treaty and despite leaving the EU, the flow hasn't stopped and the damage cannot be undone. The problem is that newly arrived immigrants are generally hungry and hard working and prepared to do the jobs that others don't want, but over time they get more accustomed to the standard of living in the UK and become as entitled and complacent as everybody else, so we fill that gap with yet more immigrants. It's madness.
We have more than enough economically inactive people in the country already. There is something very fucked up with our system when millions of low skilled people who survive wholly or partially on benefits can turn their noses up at doing certain jobs, but other people from much poorer countries can arrive to take up those same jobs and make them not only economically viable, but lucrative and worth the effort. Especially if they can bring a large family with them and automatically be eligible for in work benefits, child benefit, free healthcare, free education and subsidised housing. Suddenly this low paid work as yet another Uber Eats man on a moped doesn't seem so badly paid at all, does it? Especially compared to what they'd be earning in Kurdistan or Bangladesh or Kosovo.