A report has found that the British taxpayer has subsidised foreign students and “economically inactive” migrants without jobs to the tune of £36 billion over the past three years.
An analysis of the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) by the Centre for Migration Control think tank has found that jobless migrants who entered the country legally have received £23.74 billion in support from the taxpayer since 2020.
According to the latest ONS figures, between October and December, an estimated 724,000 migrants were living in the UK between the ages of 16 and 64 deemed to be “economically inactive”, which the government defines as “people not in employment who have not been seeking work within the last 4 weeks and/or are unable to start work within the next 2 weeks.” This has risen from 623,500 in 2020, a 16 per cent increase.
When taking international students into account, the number of foreigners receiving financial support from the government climbs to 1,135,949 in 2023, compared to 909,771 in 2020, a 25 per cent increase. In total, according to the Centre for Migration Control, foreign students and jobless legal migrants cost the UK taxpayer £35.84 billion since 2020, The Express reported.
Despite longstanding promises from the Conservative government to reduce migration to the tens of thousands — which senior officials have admitted was merely election rhetoric and not something the party ever had any intention of fulfilling — mass immigration to Britain has continued to rise, with a record 1.4 million foreigners being allowed into the country over the past two years, alone.
Commenting on the report, Brexit leader Nigel Farage said: “These figures are staggering. If immigration is making us that much poorer, then real political change must happen.”
The research director at the Centre for Migration Control Robert Bates said that the report demonstrated that “mass migration is far from the economic panacea that the advocates of open borders purport it to be.”
The public has been told ad nauseam from the political class and establishment media about the supposed positives of mass migration, with open borders advocates claiming that it was necessary to spur economic growth. Yet despite seeing the largest ever wave of foreigners enter the country, Bates noted that this has failed to prevent the country from going into a recession.
“The UK is now in a recession and GDP per capita has plummeted through the floorboards. Our policymakers need to shed the illusion that, somehow, another year of net migration running in the hundreds of thousands will turn the ship around.”
“We have had twenty years of limitless migration, and those with legitimate concerns were simply told that it is an economic necessity. But the fact is that there are now over a million migrants who are making no economic contribution to the UK coffers and are in fact imposing a net drain.”
While polls consistently indicate that the public favours massive reductions in legal immigration, there appears little appetite for the top brass in the Tory party to reverse course, with Chancellor Jeremy Hunt reportedly believing that the economic benefits of adding hundreds of thousands of more migrants per year will allow the government to keep taxes high and dig the government out of the debt it dug itself into during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Migration and the economy look to be the top issues of the next general election in Britain and are likely to cost the Conservatives Downing Street. The BBC even noted that as with the recent by-election losses to the left-wing Labour party, the precipitous fall of the Tories is being driven in large part by voter apathy, that Conservative voters are staying at home over a sense that neither major party is worth voting for.