Illegal immigration costs the British taxpayer at least £14 billion per year in public services, alone, posing an “existential” risk to the country, draining badly needed and limited resources, a former government minister has said.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the Deputy Chairwoman of the European Research Group (ERG) and former Minister of State for Skills under short-termed PM Liz Truss, told fellow MPs this week that, according to official statistics, each illegal migrant costs the taxpayer on average £12,000 per year in public services. With an estimated 1.2 million illegals living in the country, the cost in services alone is upwards of £14.4 billion, Dame Andrea calculated.
The former government minister and leading critic of neo-liberal Prime Minister Rishi Sunak noted that the money spent on illegals was nearly 10 per cent of the entire annual budget for the National Health Service (NHS) in England, saying: “Imagine that as a cash injection for our national health service.”
“For too long, the UK has been seen as a free lunch. Study, work, marry or smuggle your way in and soon you are guaranteed a lifelong all-you-can-eat buffet for you and your extended family,” she said in comments reported by the Daily Mail.
“Free healthcare, education, housing, social care, legal protections, and access to one of the largest charitable sectors in the world. It is demonstrably unfair to continue to ask the British taxpayer to pick up the bill.”
Jenkyns also noted that the Home Office — the government department tasked with handling immigration — is projected to spend £482 million on immigration enforcement this year and nearly £8 million per day to accommodate boat migrants who crossed the English Channel illegally from the beaches of France.
Additionally, the British government has earmarked at least £370 million in taxpayer cash to send to Rwanda, with up to £150,000 per illegal over five years for Kigali to house them as their asylum claims are processed. The government has also agreed to pay France £478 million to step up enforcement against people smugglers, despite the French Navy actively assisting migrants to reach UK territorial waters and Paris refusing to take migrants back.
The figures presented by Jenkyns also did not reflect the costs incurred to the public through mass legal migration, which has hit record highs under the Sunak administration despite Conservative Party promises to reduce net migration following Brexit, and outweighs illegal migration several times over.
Dame Andrea, one of the 11 Tory MPs to vote against the Rwanda bill for failing to go far enough, has argued that the “only viable remedy to take back full control of our borders” would be for the government to finally withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and thereby remove the authority of its associated court in Strasbourg to intervene on migrant removals, as it did in 2022, blocking the first planned flight to Rwanda, throwing the deterrence scheme into chaos.
The former government minister has also suggested that in order to confront the “existential” threat, the so-called Conservative government needs to scrap its “soft approach” to illegal immigration, calling for increased surveillance of coastlines and halting payments to France until they start stopping more people-smuggler operated migrant boats.
It comes as over 2,000 illegals have crossed the English Channel since the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act, which will supposedly clear the way for migrants to finally be relocated to the East African nation, became law last month.
With 396 illegals crossing the busy waterway between England and France between Saturday and Monday, the total for the year has now reached an estimated 8,674 according to calculations of Home Office data from the Press Association.
The news agency noted that this represented a 35 per cent increase over last year when 6,415 illegal crossings were recorded and 15 per cent up from 2022 when 7,581 had arrived at this point of the year.