Whether immigration is good for a country’s economy and public finances is a subject of intensifying debate in Britain in recent years. The most consequential domestic policy issue of the year is whether the government goes ahead with its plans to extend the qualifying period for new migrants to receive permanent settlement, welfare entitlements, and eligibility for citizenship from five to 10 years. Extending this would save the British taxpayer billions of pounds, according to the government, by avoiding handing welfare access to the Boriswave of migrants—drawn largely from countries like India and Nigeria on low salaries.

A large amount of research has been conducted in various countries into the life-cycle fiscal effects of immigration. The famous “It’s Complicated” chart published by the Economist in 2021 highlighted how migrants from different parts of the world contribute radically different amounts to the economies and public finances of their host nations, in that instance Denmark. The chart confirmed what many thought but didn’t have the data to hand to say: Migrants from countries in the Middle East, for example, posed huge lifetime fiscal costs on Denmark, as did those from Africa and much of Asia. Western migrants, by contrast, made positive contributions to the Danish economy and public finances. 

Similar results were found in the Netherlands, when the Dutch academic Jan van der Beek published his empirical study The Borderless Welfare State in 2023, which found that the Dutch taxpayer spent as much on migrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries between 1995 and 2019 as the state gathered in tax revenues from the Dutch natural gas fields from 1963 to the present day.

Britain doesn’t collect data so rigorously as the Dutch or the Danes, but there have been various attempts by official bodies and private organizations to conduct such studies. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has attempted to quantify the fiscal effects of migration, but its efforts have been hitherto unsuccessful. Instead of analyzing the tax contributions compared to public service consumption of migrants and their dependents based on their country of origin, they instead made assumptions that migrants arrive in the UK at 25 years of age and categorizes their contribution depending on whether they earn above, below, or in-line with median British earnings. This is entirely unsatisfactory, but a general picture is still possible to draw. Historical data showed that migration to the UK from Western European nations and countries like the United States and Australia is fiscally positive. Migration from Eastern Europe is less positive, but still a net contributor, and migration from the rest of the world—South Asia and Africa, primarily—is negative. 

This much is unsurprising. What is interesting is to examine the mindset and attitudes of different types of migrants and why they are in Britain. Much has been made of the revelation of YouTube channels set up by Indian migrants in Canada offering advice to new arrivals on how to gain access to free food from foodbanks, and the research published by Pimlico Journal, a dissident Substack, on the high proportion of migrants in London’s social housing. If they have moved to these countries for work, it is right to wonder why they are relying on state benefits or charitable handouts. 

The phrase “we are here because you were there” has often been invoked by migrants and their descendants in Western countries as a justification not just for immigration but for migrant use of welfare and public services. The TV personality Jameela Jamil recently invoked this on a podcast and her Substack, claiming that Britain and the British people are “evil,” that they destroyed countries like India under the Empire, and that migration is essentially a form of reparations from the British people. While Jamil is one person, though reasonably prominent and well followed, her post raises a number of interesting issues. Do migrants from Britain’s former colonies think of their presence in Britain as a form of revenge for Empire, as the polemical journalist Mehdi Hasan suggested recently, and what does that say about this attitude to contributing to the country and making their life in the United Kingdom? 

This is hard to prove empirically. Opinion polling over the years has found that migrants and some ethnic minority groups have a greater attachment to their “Britishness” than the native population. However, that is not conclusive itself. First, in an ancient country like Britain, national attachment and belonging is more likely to be an assumed, unstated feeling than something explicitly and ideologically expressed. Second, for many migrants and their descendants, moving to Britain and becoming British represents an escape from what came before, providing them with security and greater prosperity than life in their home countries. 

More tangible and specific measures may be worth using instead, like rates of intermarriage with the local British population, welfare consumption, or whether the British-born descendants of migrants are likely to serve in Britain’s armed forces. When it comes to intermarriage and armed forces enlistment, those from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds show the greatest propensity to integrate into the existing British population, more so than Indians, and much more than those from Pakistan and Bangladesh. When it comes to welfare dependency, however, the Office for National Statistics showed that black people in Britain received the greatest welfare benefits compared to taxes paid, more than Asians (including subcontinentals), who were roughly level, and much more than white people, who contribute more in taxes than they consume in welfare. Frustratingly, these figures were only provided on an ethnic basis without additional information around country of origin, which complicates the already murky picture. 

Nevertheless, ease of welfare access as a driver of migration is worth examining. Illegal immigrants, certainly, have been known to target countries which are most likely to offer them asylum and financial support. Britain, with its low rates of deportation and legally mandated room and board for asylum seekers, thanks to the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and web of case law preventing deportation based on the Human Rights Act 1998, is therefore an attractive destination. When it looked like the Rwanda deportation plan was about to activate in 2024, many illegal immigrants travelled to the Republic of Ireland as they thought it would be a more welcoming country. Changes to the UK’s welfare policy in the 1970s stopped local authorities from prioritizing British people over migrants for social housing, and if someone granted refugee status can demonstrate they are vulnerable and at risk of homelessness, then local councils are obliged to help them. That is different to France, for example, which does not offer accommodation for all asylum seekers, leaving many of them homeless—and eager to come to the UK.

There is a strong relationship between legal migration and welfare access, as well. More than 1 million migrants in the UK claim Universal Credit, the country’s flagship benefit, and over 700,000 of those people are EU citizens. Once a legal migrant attains indefinite leave to remain, they can make full use of the welfare state. This happens typically after five years working in the UK on a skilled worker visa. Many loopholes to this exist, however, and local authorities are known for offering exemptions, especially to migrants with dependent children. This means migrant families can receive priority access to social housing, even in parts of the country with long waiting lists. This has been documented by the think tank Onward in its report Loophole Nation, which highlighted how local councils spend tens of millions of pounds a per year on welfare to migrants who should otherwise not be in receipt of public funds. 

In 2013, the radical Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary, called upon fellow Muslims to claim benefits as a way of extracting money and resources from the British people (“kuffars”), who “work eight or nine hours a day” to fund jihad against them. Choudary is an extreme case, a proudly explicit believer that his presence in Britain is extractive and vengeful. Though few are so aggressive and ideological as Choudary, recent events suggest that many migrants see achieving permanent residency and welfare access as one of the main reasons to stay in the UK. 

The core complaint of migrant care workers, for example, who are awaiting permanent residency, has been their desire to claim benefits and leave the care sector. The health and care visa, introduced in 2020, is probably the worst-designed visa in British history. Around 600,000 people have come to Britain on it. The majority of these people are not in fact workers but dependents of workers, with migrants from countries like Nigeria and Zimbabwe having the greatest proportion of dependents to workers. 

Despite hundreds of thousands of workers coming, labor shortages in the care sector still persist such that the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, made reforming social care a key plank in his political program. Far from the health and care visa securing the sustainability of the care sector, it seems to have provided a cheaper and easier route to Britain than other visa routes. Unsurprisingly, the quality of care has not improved despite the deliberate pivot to immigrant labor. Prosperity Institute polling found widespread dissatisfaction among the British public over the quality of care provided by migrant healthcare workers, many of whom have a poor grasp of English and a rough bedside manner. Similarly, Cambridge Circus Research has been investigating the rates of official investigations into poor quality care at care homes with high rates of visa sponsorship.

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The campaigners for permanent settlement have highlighted the poor working conditions in the care sector. Indeed, the visa is so badly designed that many people moved to Britain to work in care homes that did not exist. Evidently, exploitation in this route exists, and the Guardian provided examples of workers living in sheds, feeling like indentured servants to exploitative employers. But even those workers seem to be far keener on achieving permanent settlement instead of returning home. 

This points to a fundamental truth about modern migration from the Third World to rich countries, which puts questions around post-colonial resentment, welfare tourism and overall fiscal contributions in the shade. Life, living standards, and opportunity are simply so much better in Western countries than in the developing world. Even a life of borderline destitution in the UK provides someone with more opportunity in countries like India or Nigeria—the two largest sources of legal migration in recent years—and the ease of international travel has made this a much more attainable prospect for people the world over. 

Just because migration offers the individual migrant opportunity for a better life does not mean that the people of the target country have any obligation to provide it. A migration policy based on the notion that immigration is a form of reparation for colonialism is not a recipe for a happy or prosperous society. Milton Friedman was correct that welfare states and open borders cannot coexist, but one should go further and state explicitly that Britain’s immigration policy must operate to the benefit of the British people. Any grants of citizenship should be made on the basis of a migrant’s proven potential contribution to the country and likelihood of assimilation to the British way of life and wider British family. A nation clearer about its intent and interest in the welfare of the British people above all would ultimately attract fewer people intending on exploiting its welfare state and, conversely, likely become more appealing to those who might wish to play a real and positive part in Britain’s future story.