Why are we importing people to be a burden on the welfare state?
A smart migration policy would limit access to social housing for non-citizens and focus on ensuring most arrivals are people likely to make a big economic contribution.
I THINK we can all agree that social housing is a resource in very scarce supply in the United Kingdom.
More than a million British families are on social housing waiting lists. At least 30,000 people have been waiting for ten years or more.
And it is not even just a question of more money being needed to tackle the chronic shortfall. Our planning system is necessarily rigorous given our relatively small landmass and high population density, so the physical capacity of the state to sufficiently increase supply is also constrained.
Yet having a council or housing association tenancy does not just bring a family some much-needed stability on the home front, it is also worth a small fortune. Typically the rent on a social home is about half that which the same home would attract on the private market – a subsidy worth several thousand pounds a year to tenants.
Given all this, it surely follows that it cannot be a good idea to import people from other nations to take up social housing in the UK ahead of our own citizens. And given all we hear from the pro-mass migration zealots about the alleged economic boon provided, one would expect to find a very low take-up rate for social housing among migrant groups.
Yet this turns out not to be the case. Figures from the Oxford Migration Observatory show that the proportion of foreign-born UK residents living in social housing is actually slightly higher overall than for UK-born citizens, 17 per cent compared to 16 per cent.
Far from sensibly arranging a migrant population dominated by wealthy go-getters, we have actually managed to import a needier cohort of people than we had living in the country in the first place.
But the real eye-opener comes when one looks at the breakdown of the social housing uptake of different migrant groups. While only six per cent of Indian-born people are in social housing, an astonishing 30 per cent of sub-Saharan African migrants in the UK live in social housing. That rises to a frankly preposterous 40 per cent in London – the most expensive city in Europe for housing. So while many UK families have been forced to leave the capital city they were born in due to housing costs, a big chunk of its social housing stock has been turned over to those arriving from other countries.
How can that be remotely economically justifiable, let alone accord to anyone’s idea of treating our own UK-born national citizens fairly?
Though sub-Saharan Africans lead the way, there are other foreign-born groups with a greater than average social housing occupation rate, including those born in Pakistan.
It strikes me that British governments could tackle this ludicrous situation in two ways. The first would be to ensure that we stop importing impoverished economic migrants to do low-paid work and ensure that only those with high-salary job offers get to move here. The second is to legislate for some form of citizen preference in the allocation of council and housing association properties.
This could range from awarding housing bonus points to those born in the UK all the way up to an outright ban on those born abroad from occupying UK social housing.
In fact no major party appears to be showing any interest in citizen preference in this field, as is shown by recent reports of permanent social housing being built that can only be applied for by refugees from Ukraine or Afghanistan. Cases of this have hit the headlines in Shropshire and in Camden in London, but the policy appears to be a nationwide one, ironically developed under the Government’s “levelling-up” funding stream.
The results of a 2021 academic study in the Netherlands, meanwhile, suggest that any government wishing genuinely to maximise potential economic benefits from immigration needs properly to address the question of which countries it should take migrants from and for what purpose.
(PDF) Book Review: [i]Borderless Welfare State: The Consequences of Immigration on Public Finances [Grenzeloze verzorgingsstaat: De gevolgen van immigratie voor de overheidsfinanciën][/i] (researchgate.net)
The team at the University of Amsterdam found that the average lifetime net contribution of immigrants to Dutch public finances, including costs associated for the second generation, was €125,000 for those who had come on work visas. That’s a decent return.
But for those coming for family reunification it was hugely negative, running to - €275,000 and for those coming to claim asylum it was a whopping - €475,000. Interestingly, the most expensive migrants were those coming from the Horn of Africa and Sudan, who clocked up negative fiscal impacts averaging - €600,000 each.
These sharply varying costs, combined with the picture that has been revealed on UK social housing uptake, indicate that a smart immigration policy for the future would be selective about both the purpose of immigration and the countries we take most immigrants from.
But will any party be courageous enough to take on these arguments anytime soon?
The mass immigration idea was originally dreamed up by the Blair government.
Import new tax-payers to help fund the public services of an ageing population.
Fair enough, on the face of it.
They didn't think it right through, and because there was a criminal lack of screening of those coming here, we imported not nett contributors, but nett beneficiaries, taking up low-paid, low skill work, and being given all sorts of social credits/benefits by the government to top up their wages.
Some of them work in the "cash" economy (ask a minicab driver for a receipt LOL), so pay very little or nothing back in to the treasury. Some were never interested in working at all, like far, far too many UK born nationals.
The housing problem is but one facet on this ticking bomb, because public services need taxpayer money to function, and we are approaching the time when there will be more taking out of the pot than putting in.
You can't keep leaching big business and millionaires with extortionate taxes, (Copyright the Labour Party) as they'll all bugger off elsewhere.
The word has gone out. It's Soft touch UK. That is why they're turning up on the beaches, and everything that our politicians and the bleeding hearts do just encourages more and more to come.
Tents in European cities, 4* hotels, food, pocket money here.
It's a complete Fcuk up, and will ultimately end in social disorder.
The Dutch report should be more widely advertised as it comprehensively does away with the last remaining excuse that the "smart people" have for mass immigration. Immigration may help boost national GDP via what seems like an accounting trick, but it makes GDP per capita worse. If 50% of households in the UK already take out more than they put in, how on earth can people think that low wage migrants are ever going to be net contributors? And how much are we borrowing each year in order to pay for those costs?
Think I remember reading immigration costs in the UK were estimated at around £10bn a year in the UK (2007 HoL report?) and recently saw an estimate for France that it cost them around 20bn Euros a year, so how much of our national debt is now directly due to mass immigration? Must be at least a double figures percentage, could be up to 25% if the French figure is comparable.
We should only be taking migrants from countries with comparable or compatible cultures and the international asylum system should be reorganised so that those seeking refuge either temporarily stay in similar nearby countries before returning or else can only settle in countries with similar cultures thus making assimilation and integration much easier. But instead the west seems desperate to continue with the lowest common denominator approach of mass immigration and multiculturalism.
Time is running out for those in charge to take charge of the problem or else soon it feels like things are going to start spiralling out of control.