The debate over immigration is often framed in terms of whether “immigrants” are good for the economy. Proponents of immigration argue that “immigrants” contribute more than they take, while opponents argue the reverse. Yet as I’ve argued before, this makes very little sense.
An immigrant is someone who was born in another country. Do people born in other countries have a general predisposition to contribute more than they take? Of course not. If they did, we could just swap the British and French populations, and – hey presto – both countries would be richer!
Some immigrants contribute more than they take and others contribute less. It depends entirely on the immigrants. In fact, it depends on factors that we can measure in surveys – such as education, reason for migration and country of origin.
For example, people with less education who come as refugees from war-torn countries in the Middle East tend to contribute less than they take. Meanwhile, people with more education who come as skilled workers from wealthy countries in Western Europe tend to contribute more than they take.
We know this is true in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, where there have been detailed reports on the fiscal effects of immigration. But what about Britain?
The obvious place to start is average earnings. After all, people with higher earnings are more likely to be net contributors. Unfortunately, however, the Office for National Statistics doesn’t publish a breakdown of average earnings for immigrants from different countries of origin.
Enter MP Neil O’Brien. Now, you might remember O’Brien from the lockdown debate. He was one of the individuals behind the pro-lockdown website ‘Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ’, which purported to debunk claims by “Covid sceptics” and had a whole section dedicated to our very own Toby Young.
But a man can change. Or at least, he can be right on some issues and very wrong on others. And while O’Brien may have been wrong on lockdowns, he seems to be about right on immigration. In a recent Substack article, the MP presents results from an FOI request he made for earnings of different immigrant groups in Britain. Results are shown below.
What can you see? The first thing to notice is that there’s a lot of variation across groups. The highest-earning group, Australians, make an average of about £4,000 per month. (Note that although Americans earn more at the 75th percentile, Australians earn more on average.) By contrast, the lowest-earning group, Bangladeshis, make an average of about £1,200 per month.
The next thing to notice is the geographic pattern. On the right-hand side of the chart, we see countries wealthy Western countries along with South Africa (which presumably means wealthy white South Africans). And on the left-hand side of the chart, we see poorer countries in South Asia and Eastern Europe.
Britain itself is roughly in the middle of the chart. And the country is currently running a fiscal deficit, which means the average person is contributing slightly less than he or she is taking. It also means that people from all the countries to the left of Britain must be contributing less than they’re taking.
Thanks to O’Brien’s FOI request, we know that the claim “immigrants are good for the economy” isn’t true for all groups. Which raises the question: why exactly are we taking large numbers of people who aren’t good for the economy?
Stop Press: O’Brien was told by HMRC that they have stopped publishing data on tax contributions by nationality.
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We’re doomed
As someone pointed out on another forum I use, white people have been exceptionally good at lots of things that have made our lives better, but we are failing at breeding and protecting our borders which means our civilisation will be wiped out
I’ll probably get censored now for being a horrible racist and spreading hate speech but I feel it’s important to be blunt
To be more informative the chart could usefully go back a few generations, say as far as the end of WW2 onwards
Of course, more information is, err more informatiion. I do not see what difference it makes. The point is that recent immigrants appear not to be suppoirting themselves,. What they did in the 1950s does not seem relevant
My gut feel is that the impact over decades has not been positive and doesn’t improve greatly over time
During the EU Referendum I voted Leave and used the following argument why uncontrolled immigration reduces the wages of the lower paid.
Even as far back as 2010 a report in the pro-EU Guardian stated that Eastern European immigration ‘has hit low-paid Britons’. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/17/eastern-european-immigration-hits-wages
Other EU countries controlled the numbers of East Europeans entering their countries. The UK under Blair did not.
What is it like now with even more East Europeans coming here since Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2014 and greedy capitalists deliberately keeping wages down to maximize their profits?
Migration Watch said the figures make it ‘extremely unlikely’ that migrants in the lowest-skilled jobs are making a positive net fiscal contribution. Workers earning less than £10,600 do not pay income tax. Many migrant workers send money to their home country taking it out of the UK economy.
And a study of pay in London found the lowest-paid 20 per cent have seen wages fall by 15 per cent on average.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3088541/Three-four-migrants-Eastern-Europe-filling-low-skill-jobs-roles-fruit-picking-evidence-mounts-cheap-labour-forcing-British-workers-pay.html
It is a proven fact by many studies that uncontrolled EU immigration lowers UK wages for the unskilled. Even the Bank of England report from Dec 2015 showed that the low paid are adversely effected. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12063052/Mass-migration-driving-down-wages-offered-to-British-jobseekers.html
The UK minimum wage attracts EU economic migrants which we have no power to stop whilst we are in the EU. In 2016 the statutory minimum wage in Bulgaria was only 216 euros a month (approx £1.15 per hour) and Romania 276 euros a month (approx £1.44 per hour).
The EU was NOT a level playing field.
http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/articles/working-conditions-industrial-relations/statutory-minimum-wages-in-the-eu-2016
Migration from EU member states is slowing wage increases in Germany, according to the head of the Bundesbank. Jens Weidmann. The institution’s research “suggests that migration from other EU member states partially accounts for damped wage pressures in Germany”. https://www.ft.com/content/0adaf400-fc45-11e7-a492-2c9be7f3120a
The Central Bank of Ireland admits that a lack of migrants is making wages go up.
https://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/article38356212.ece?fbclid=IwAR0PoC3z1mvFMnbespVY9v2TUTYtdosCblrCrsD0VvGkTZ5CbaPCvsHuBJs
In places such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, supply and demand appear to be pushing up wages as labour becomes scarce.
https://www.marketscreener.com/HUDSON-S-BAY-COMPANY-11955244/news/Labor-Shortage-Lifts-Wages-on-Europe-s-Eastern-Flank-27329407/
Average salary in construction soars to £46,000 as UK loses EU workers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-pay-soars-in-construction-jobs-as-uk-loses-eu-workers-brexit-095802086.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvL00xTWQ0Q2Myb3o&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAANgPkqJ75_D12YLq7s_SL3QMBAXDwhTrOuHY3KFcfeZEUp-z0lU9k9Ur68ItlLdY4tGDwVcRvdnhz2R6ovJ_jeRR_NZwkT0ZHoVk88RY1wM_EyLmUnnZuhy_gCZHdLHomg_lM-7c78UyBXV3KTY9L3dSOhb4xKzBpxH_qwmXsB&_guc_consent_skip=1582573921
The study by Migration Watch (2016) states ……
“The broad findings are that the overall fiscal effect in 2014/15 of the immigrant population in the UK was negative.”
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/381
“Unprecedented levels of immigration into the UK have led to a substantial rise in cheap labour (causing downward pressure on wages), tested social cohesion like never before, and increased the strain on public services. The abject failure of Labour over many years to address these concerns – or even to recognise their legitimacy – has resulted in a fundamental rupture between the party and its traditional heartlands, so that millions of once-loyal Labour voters now abstain in general elections or have switched their allegiance.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/paul-embery/freedom-of-movement_b_13112058.html?guccounter=1
That’s all nice and dandy. But ‘controlled’ open door immigration by people of global majority heritage, as opposed to people from Poland coming here for work who were strictly prohibited from living off welfare, has certainly not improved the situation.
Controlling it means keeping it down to an absolute minimum.
That’s not the idea of the people who exercise this control.
It is difficult to undstand what you mean by “greedy capitalists”. Or the suggestion they are keeping wages down.
The labour market is one of supply and demand. If the government keeps i,porting hundreds of thousands of additional workers for the low skill, low pay sectors, what do you think will happen to wages?
“Greedy capitalists” are those who welcome and promote immigration because they can then employ people willing to work for peanuts.
Steve Sailer calls them the NAABP – National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People. For those who don’t follow US politics it’s a play on the NAACP
Yes, I sometimes read articles by Steve Sailer on my daily dose of The UNZ Review.
The comments are usually worth a look and moderated with a light touch but there’s no playground level name calling
Unz seems like a free speech absolutist with the resources to make it work. I dip into some of the other bloggers too.
Of course HMRC has stopped publishing useful data.
it would be useful to have the data weighted by numbers of people, including dependents.
also, could some work be done on the cost of public infrastructure. Unless a new comer can fund that the rest of us will pay or queue.
Good point about weighting by numbers- it would surely look way worse
Also notice lots of nationalities missed out- why?
Averages are weighted by numbers.
That’s not what he means. He means showing these figures for all immigrants in totality. E.g. ‘average immigrant regardless of nationality had a wage in the 30th percentile of the country at large’, or similar.
Exactly. If there are a preponderance of (say) Bangladeshis then the deficit is huge whereas if the preponderance was Aussies it would be much lower.
I know the answer but data would be useful.
I am surprised Migration Watch UK does not provide this sort of data.
All previous reports have shown that uncontrolled immigration lowers the wages of the poorest in society.
Immigration MUST be controlled.
Control alone is not enough. It must also be exercised in a sensible way.
It should be kept to an absolute minimum.
If we are employing foreign workers it means the UK government hasn’t encouraged the training of the indigenous people.
Corporations who donate to political parties have an agenda to maximize their profits.
One way is to employ cheap foreign labour at the detriment of the local workforce which is morally wrong.
Tax contributions by nationality isn’t really a fair or sensible statistic. There are certainly homeless Austrialians in the UK as well as very wealthy Bangladeshis. The former shouldn’t be grouped together with the well-earning Australians and the latter not with the poor Bangladeshis. Doing this nevertheless creates a racist distortion of reality. Average people don’t immigrate, real people do.
The first step is to prove that not all immigrants are equal. In the unlikely event anyone accepts that, you then decide what to do about it- refine your criteria, stop immigration altogether, or accept the status quo. If you refine your criteria you either make it completely individual or more blanket based on country of birth – each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.
But none of this will happen. There will never be a really frank debate about it because racism.
Country of birth is simply not sensible here, as demonstrated by the fact that their are low-earning Australians and low-earning Bangladeshis in the UK. Assuming that earnings are a sensible category at all (Carl claims that this is the case), one would need to look at what these low-earners have in common instead of at what makes them different. That was what the points-based immigration system was supposed to be about: Identify categories of prospective immigrants and use them for objective assessments how desirable or undesirable any individual candidate is.
Well my preference is to treat people as individuals but the points based system seems to have failed and I reckon you’d get closer to the desired result by using country of birth (as a proxy for race) and it would be easier to administer.
But my real preference is for it to stop completely, right now. We’ve already had too much
This would put British universities out of business. This may not be a bad thing, considering what university people are usually up to :->, but won’t be doable overnight. IMHO, a better policy would be one of locals first in anything¹ and thus, gradually weaning the UK off its technical addiction to immigrants, based on recognizing that population churn is principally a bad thing and efforts to reduce it are called for.
¹ That’s a BNP policy and thus ultra-extreme-far-righter-than-extreme-far-right or something like that in present-day political lingo.
Theresa May’s solution was to ‘create a hostile environment’ for illegal immigrant. And you may recall the buses with a ‘we will assist you in getting home’ messages to illegal migrants. I agree with that but as you can imagine she got criticised for her choice of words. Only about 15 years ago or so, but hard to imagine now..
Theresa May’s ‘solution’ (ROTFLMAO) was to create what she believed to be a hostile environment for all immigrants, no matter for how long they’ve already been living in the country, by requiring landlords, employers and bank clerks to check the immigration status of people who aren’t British subjects/ citizens prior to doing business with them every time. If she honestly believed this would bother people working illegally in the cash economy and (obviously) also living in illegally rented accomodation very much, this might have been because people from Maidenhead are a bit naive wrt the really large world outside of Maidenhead. But maybe, she just believed people from Maidenhead would certainly believe that.
That’s a bit besides the point here, though, as the article is about legal replacement immigration (as the UN calls that, according to a comment posted by sskinner yesterday), ie, trying to solve the problems caused by so-called demographic change by getting people from elsewhere on the planet to stuff the holes (so to say). But you obviously cannot replace the English population of England with a mixed multitude drawn from all over the globe without England ceasing to be England. Our ruling castes tacitly accept that, if they don’t outright welcome it (like the Irish MP who talked about boringly Irish and rural Ireland, which was thankfully becoming a thing of the past) because they road in the other direction is blocked by a sign flashing in red with Fascism! Sexism! Racism! Oh-the-horror-ism! written on it.
Yes I would agree there is merit in your suggestions and comments
I don’t need to know the fancy ONS data, I just go by my own eyes, and at this rate you’re going to be the polar opposite of ”enriched” come the end of the year if this is where you are first week of March, and I don’t get the impression these are all ‘highly skilled migrants’. From today;
”Yesterday 401 Migrants in 7 PACKED dinghies were escorted across the channel.
Total in march so far 728!
Total this year – 2983.”
From yesterday;
”Today the RNLI will celebrate 200 years of saving lives at sea by acting as an UBER service picking up migrants from the French
That has been their job for the last 4 years since the invasion
So far this year 2582 migrants have crossed the Channel in 56 boats.”
https://twitter.com/ActivePatriotUK/status/1764652752859205657
I suspect those people are not even appearing in the stats quoted
Britain should severely limit immigration, but part of the solution could be to increase highly capable immigration.
If you get an IQ above 140 (yes I know 150 is the IQ cut off), you can immigrate to Britain. To give you a feel of what that means, that would place you in the top 1% of Britain’s population, by IQ, and jobs wise you could do a higher end engineering job, and you would probably be paid at least £150K.
That should of course be capped, as even with this criteria we could quickly end up with millions of new high IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants.
This would pull up the productivity of the UK economy overall.
There is also an argument for tilting immigration towards females.
And lastly, end naturalisation of immigrants. Settled status only. British citizenship only for those with at least one British parent. That would limit voting rights to those who had assimilated, and also mean that the body politic would evolve at a glacial pace.
It’s not merely how much they earn but whether they want to put costs onto society by, for example, not learning English.
There are networks operating in this country taking millions out a week and seriously the people involved are also claiming benefits. A lot of poeple take a gaming approach to life, If there is a system then I will game it. I have an extensive knioweldge of this behaviour it is bad on many levels. I would say wake up to it.We are talking about warfare on every level just be aware of that. That means knowing when to keep your mouth shut and when to listen.
Don’t be naive about the situation. They have calibrated immigration and eveything else in order to extract the maximum. Dont get caught up in the discussions we might’ve had 10 years ago. Reality has changed and not for the better, I am happy to talk to anyone who acknowledges reality and I am happy to comfort anyone who chooses to ignore it,