MigrationWatch is more interested in scaremongering than getting the facts right.
MigrationWatch has published a paper by its leader Sir Andrew Green which says that Britain should remove the ‘pull‘ for new immigrants.
When he speaks of the ‘pull’, he is referring to the UK’s minimum wage and the benefits available here which are worth up to five times more than those in Romania and Bulgaria.
MigrationWatch has a long and illustrious history of skewed data about immigrants.
For the most part, their anti-immigration sentiment flows from two categories: economic concerns, where it is claimed immigrants have a detrimental impact on employment, and social issues, or in other words, losing our ‘Britishness’.
I will focus on the former.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has recently shown through statistical evidence that, specifically during a recession or low growth period, net immigration has little or no impact on unemployment in the host country.
This may be because most migrants move to a country for a specific reason, rather than just for the sake of it. They may already have a job, are willing to take up lower paid work, or indeed they may be students who tend to be self-supporting.
For the most part, people do not make huge life changing decisions, such as moving to a new country, on a whim.
As MigrantWatch has pointed out, 26 million Bulgarians and Romanians will be able to move to the UK from January 1st 2014. Forgetting the other 26 EU states they could go to, and assuming that the entire population of Bulgaria and Romania decide to up sticks and come here, they are technically correct.
What MigrationWatch forgets, however, is that the citizens of both countries have been free to come to the UK to live for the past six years. The only restrictions have been on the labour markets.
Additionally, MigrantWatch and its affiliates are concerned that the EU will allow Romanians to come over to the UK and claim benefits rather than work.
The stats, however, don’t back this up.
In the 2010/11 fiscal year, 5.5 million out of the 38 million UK working age population claimed work related benefits, including Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support and the like.
Of these, 371,000 were non-UK nationals, a quarter of whom were from other EU countries.
Therefore, out of the 2.2 million EU nationals in the UK in 2010, 4.21% claimed working benefits. By contrast, 14.32% of British nationals within the age range were doing the same.
The difference is staggering, and coupled with the above NIESR report, shows that migrants don’t come for the benefits, nor do they ‘steal jobs’, as some believe.
15 Responses to “MigrationWatch is scaremongering, as usual”
Mr Reasonable
Oh, that’s very good, because Bulgarians and Romanians are so economically backward that they use horses instead of cars! And we are so nutritionally backward that we don’t know what goes into our cheap, processed food products! But if we’ve eaten their horses, how will these unscrupulous foreign types travel to Britain to steal our benefits and spank our women? Perhaps they have some other form of transport? Oxen? Sedan chairs? Zeppelins? If it’s the latter, we’d better keep watching the skies…
John Smith
Even 1 is too many we do not have the housing, schools, nhs resources and the benefits system definately cannot cope
Sign this petition to restrict Bulgarian and Romanians from entering the UK:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/41492
Already over 48,000. At 100,000 it goes to Parliament
Newsbot9
Yes, yes, gotta spam the link, gotta break the economy and block the recovery.
Newsbot9
Yes, it “causes” damage by creating the sort of racist and bigoted attacks on this country which you are causing. This isn’t a reason to listen to your lies, of course, You”re trying to raise unemployment to more like 13 million by collapsing the economy further – and of course, the evidence is that immigration does not, in fact, raise unemployment. As has been seen in numerous studies, in i.e. Miami.
Newsbot9
Yes, that’s right, they’re “foreign”. To you, this a problem.
Hence you want to eliminate migrants. Both in and out, of course.
You want to drive the debt higher by eliminating trade, and are smokescreening for that again. Keep calling for only non-working leeches, who will cost the country money, to immigrate. They’re “rich”, after all.