Perhaps because it’s the week before Christmas, the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) latest annual report has attracted little attention.
Many people can’t have read it, because it is full of incendiary details which demolish the case for mass migration. The MAC is ‘an advisory non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office’. It is not a political body, and its board is comprised of sober, sensible academics, who have set out to model ‘net fiscal impact’ – the costs, or benefits to the taxpayer of different kinds of migration. It’s worth noting that they do not seek to model second- or third-order costs of migration, such as housing costs, crime or long-term suppression of wages and birth rates.
For decades we have imported people who will be a net drain on taxpayers, because we arbitrarily decided to ignore what happens after they’ve been here for five years
On asylum, the MAC are absolutely clear, stating that they ‘expect the net fiscal impact of those entering through asylum and refugee routes to be unambiguously negative’. The academics explain this is because asylum seekers have ‘low employment rates and wages, high rates of economic inactivity’ and because they are able to claim benefits sooner, being exempt from the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule. Further, ‘asylum migrants are also much less likely to have earnings at the higher end of the distribution’. The reality is that asylum seekers are not generally doctors or engineers.
The report also notes that research in other countries shows a ‘sizeable negative lifetime impact’ from asylum seekers, with a detailed, data-led 2024 study from the Netherlands finding that each migrant granted asylum cost the Dutch state around €400,000 over their lifetime. What might it mean if the UK faced similar costs? Last year 108,138 people claimed asylum here. Around half of them were granted asylum at ‘initial decision’, but after appeal we should expect at least two-thirds to have their claim granted, based on previous years. This would mean that just for 2024’s asylum seekers we should expect around 70,000 to have their claim granted, meaning a lifetime cost to British taxpayers of around £25 billion. And that figure doesn’t include the costs of housing them before their claims are granted, nor of any crimes they might commit and any prison sentences they might receive.
The MAC have powerful findings on other visa routes too, noting that ‘the average Partner route applicant… will incur a lifetime fiscal deficit… of around -£109,000’. Meanwhile even those who study here and then stay on graduate visas are not significant contributors, with the report noting that their earnings are much closer to those on dependent and partner visas than skilled workers. This follows on from last week’s MAC report on the fiscal impact of immigration, which found that even within the ‘skilled worker’ route, which is overall financially positive, ’72 per cent of the fiscal gain comes from the top 30 per cent of earners’.
I put these findings to Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, who told me:
‘This report proves that the Labour government was wrong to pause our increase to the family visa threshold to £38,700. Our reforms would have tightened up this route but instead, each person who comes on the family visa route has a lifetime cost to British taxpayers of over £100,000. We now also know the net fiscal impact of asylum seekers will cost £350,000. This is not what the British people voted for. Under a future a Conservative Government, only those who make a real contribution can stay permanently, and only British citizens will be eligible for benefits.’
All of this on its own would be enough to demolish our migration policy. But the MAC have also found a fatal flaw at the heart of how we model migration. They describe how Britain’s ‘fiscal rules are essentially evaluated over a five-year period’ which ‘implies that almost all migration is fiscally positive’, ‘but basing policy on such an outcome will impose future fiscal costs that will outweigh the short-term gains.’
Rob Bates, Director of the Centre for Migration Control told me, ‘The social costs of mass migration have been evident to all for some time, but we are now also seeing the economic case for certain visa routes being completely blown apart, along with the entire fiscal model which has justified mass migration. The question is whether we have a political establishment that is prepared to change course and abandon its longstanding commitment to open borders. With net migration set to increase under this Labour government it is looking like Westminster is prepared to double down on its failed experiment.’
So there we are. For decades we have imported people who will be a net drain on taxpayers, because we arbitrarily decided to ignore what happens after they’ve been here for five years. Our entire migration strategy appears to be based on a modelling error, under which we’ve assumed that pouring people into the economy will make us all richer, when the reverse is true.
It’s time for politicians, civil servants and all of us to get real and face the facts. We can’t afford mass migration. Mass migration makes us poorer. And it needs to end, now.
Comments