Immigration benefits the country, or does it?

For some years now Labour Government Ministers have been claiming that immigration benefits the UK financially and culturally and for just as long groups such as Migration Watch have been smeared as racist for pointing out the logical fallacies used to justify these claims. As recently as last December this Labour Governments' Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, talked of "the purity of the macroeconomic case for migration". Now a report from the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, published today, says its six-month inquiry could find no evidence to support the government's claim that a high level of net immigration has generated significant economic benefit for Britain.

This Labour Government told the House of Lords Committee that immigration had boosted Britain's economy by £6bn in 2006. The Committee said that was an "irrelevant and misleading" measure and the only one that counted was the impact of immigration on everybody's personal income. So the Home Office submitted new evidence to the inquiry based on a Low Pay Commission research study, showing that every British citizen is, on average, £30 a year better off as a result of the impact of immigration. However the Committee report says that, in the short term, immigration has created economic winners and losers. Unsurprisingly the biggest winners have been the migrants and their employers; whilst some consumers have benefited from lower prices and the Committee also make the odd claim that taxpayers also benefit from the lower costs of public services. The people that have lost out are those who have either lost their jobs or been kept out of the workforce by immigrants taking the jobs and for the most part these people are the low-paid employee.


Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, on the Toady programme this morning has been trying to mislead us with his claims about what the Committee said and what the truth of the matter was. I get so fed up with Government Ministers who claim that black is white and then when the untruthfulness of this position is made clear they concede that black may not be white but it is certainly very grey and then concede that it is at least off-white. This is a time delaying tactic and should be pointed out more strongly than it is.



For the background story you can read articles about this subject in The Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian. You can also see video of Liam Byrne and Migration Watch's Sir Andrew Green to the Committee here.