The desire to 'get on' isn't confined to affluent Westerners.
The desire to ‘get on’ isn’t confined to affluent Westerners
The mayor of Calais has been sounding off like a Daily Mail editorial. On immigration, Britain is a ‘soft touch’ and its benefits system acts like a ‘magnet’ for migrants, Natacha Bouchart told the Home Affairs Committee yesterday.
Ms Bouchart, speaking via an interpreter, said:
“You have a much more favourable regime in Britain than other countries. The second thing is the entitlement to benefits of £36 which are given to asylum seekers or migrants, which is a huge amount for people who have nothing in their lives.”
This echos the narrative of much of the UK press as well as of UKIP, the Conservative Party and sometimes Labour.
But how true is it? Apart from anecdotes and hearsay, what actual evidence is there to suggest that migrants are flocking to the UK for our supposedly generous benefits system?
It is common currency on the right that Britain has the most generous welfare system – if not in the world, then at least in Europe. Yet this is a myth, according to the Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre for Population Change (CPC), with a number of other EU countries as generous as Britain in terms of social security per head:
(click to zoom)
This data is also from 2007, before many of the rules about migrants claiming benefits were tightened by the coalition.
The data from 2010 also shows that, in terms of social security spending per inhabitant, France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands all spend more in real terms than the UK on social security:
(Graph: BBC)
There are really two separate issues here that are very often conflated. One is Asylum seekers and refugees trying to come to the UK and the other is EU citizens exercising their legal right to come and work here.
Last year a European Commission report concluded that there was no evidence of systematic or widespread benefit tourism by EU nationals migrating within the EU, including to the UK.
The statistics bear this out. According to a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) report from 2011, 6.4 per cent of those claiming working aged benefits were non-UK nationals, meaning British nationals were two-and-a-half times more likely to be claiming working age benefits than non-UK nationals.
And anyway, EU migrants can’t simply sign on to claim Jobseekers Allowance as soon as they arrive in the UK – they must wait for three months; and even them they have to pass a tough Habitual Residence Test set before they can make a claim.
And what about the coalition’s welfare reforms that will apparently make a life on benefits impossible for any British citizen? Why would it be any easier for an EU citizen to milk the system?
But this isn’t what the mayor of Calais is actually talking about. It isn’t migrants from Poland and Romania that are camped out in Calais hoping to sneak into the UK – they can already come here legally. This isn’t about immigration per se; this is about the asylum system.
Many of the people we are talking about in Calais haven’t simply left their country for the sake of a better paying job; they are fleeing war-zones like Syria, tyrannies such as Egypt or hunger that plagues many parts of Africa. As Ms Bouchart herself put it, most of the estimated 2,500 refugees in Calais are Eritrean, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi – hardly bastions of freedom.
It would be fairly far-fetched to claim that these people are fleeing their homelands due to Britain’s generous benefits system.
It is of course arguable that one of the reasons migrants opt for the UK of France is due to accommodation rules for asylum seekers who arrive in the UK. In the UK asylum seekers have access to accommodation while their claim is being assessed; in France it can take four months for an asylum claim to be registered during which time no accommodation is available.
However it is unlikely that putting an end to this would deter asylum seekers from coming to the UK for the reasons I’m about to set out; but such a policy change would result in destitute asylum seekers sleeping rough in and around London. Not exactly good policy.
There is, though, one important reason that people often want to come to Britain ahead of other countries in Europe. It isn’t the benefits system, but has more to do with the international prestige this country (still) has overseas.
Before you scoff, this isn’t jingoistic hyperbole – anyone who has travelled extensively will know exactly what I’m talking about.
When I was travelling in South American a few years ago I met plenty of people who wanted to leave their native country and it was usually because they wanted to come to the United States or Britain. Not to claim benefits, but to work and make money. Almost all had the rose-tinted view that in Britain and the US if you worked hard enough the opportunities were there and you could prosper. Naive perhaps, but very different from wanting to ‘milk the system’.
For those fleeing war zones like Syria and Iraq, it’s fairly obvious why they might think of leaving – and it has nothing to do with signing on. Similarly, for those who aren’t fleeing persecution the long and perilous journey to the UK isn’t one that’s taken lightly, nor with the aim of coming to the UK to carry on being poor. It is made because the UK is viewed as a land of opportunity.
In other words, people want to come to Britain because it is a good place to live. That’s a profoundly positive thing.
The biggest irony of all is that it is right-wingers who claim to understand the human desire to ‘get on’ and aspire to something better. Someone ought to point out that this instinct isn’t confined to affluent Westerners.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
98 Responses to “The myth of migrants ‘flocking’ to Britain’s ‘soft touch’ benefits system”
DrPlokta
The current policy is about right, and doesn’t need much changing. We should allow immigration by EU citizens, fee-paying students, spouses and children of UK or EU citizens, refugees and asylum seekers, investors, employees on inter-company transfers, and skilled workers who don’t fall into any of the other categories.
Dave Roberts
As regards British expats in various parts of the world they are invariably in employment or have brought capital and started businesses. They are an asset to those countries and communities, pay their taxes, provide for their own accommodation and are not a drain on local resources.
Totally different from the 2500 people we are at Calais trying to get to the UK. You and your like are disingenuous to the point of outright lying.
Michael Simpson
You believe that all you want buddy. I’ve got illegal immigrant friends doing odd jobs in new york, others who were deported from Australia for overstaying their visas, I know of people who married for visas. All British. All scrimping along. Most are invisible. They’re just living basically. You’re just too insulated to know.
Michael Simpson
And even then if you want to discuss assets I refer you back to the fact that our creeping pension crisis will only resolved by migrant labour. If you want to change the narrative to social cohesion as is often done then go ahead. It’s contradictory of course. How are retiree age emigrant Brits who go to the south of Spain and live in little ghettos without bothering to learn the language good for cohesion, I wonder?
Dave Roberts
I see the word cohesion as been used for the first time, it was a New Labour construct to make us believe that we were all one community when of course some of the oldest, Pakistani, Bangladeshi etc have made the least efforts to integrate.
We are back to what is meant by immigration. I and others here have made it clear that some immigration is good but, like everything, it has to be managed. You and others seem, and I say seem because you have no coherent argument, that immigration must be totally unrestricted. Could we have a definitive answer to this question please?
As regards Spain always try and know what you are talking about. I spend a lot of the year there as I have done for the last twenty five. I have a house, business and have brought up a family there so let me educate you.
It is true that man ex pats do not speak Spanish well and tend to congregate together, that is a question of age more than anything else. They do not however expect to be housed by Spain and have all bought their own properties. Their health care is paid for by the NHS which they have paid into all their lives and their pensions and other income are spent in the local economies. If they can’t speak Spanish they provide their own interpreters in encounters with officialdom.
Schools teach in Spanish and that language only. My children are fluent in both languages. British and other ex pats are seen as a benefit to Spain and not a liablity and there is no hostility towards us or other northern Europeans. That is reserved for the Romanians and South Americans as well as the Africans who are contributing to the unemployment figures and the crime rate. Unfortunate but true as you would know if you knew what you were talking about.