Immigration is good for Britain! Yippeee! Let’s encourage millions more to come here

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently produced a report claiming that immigration has improved the economies of most advanced countries. The OECD concludes that migrant workers tend to make a net contribution to the countries they move to because they tend to be younger and more economically active than the average of the wider population in their new country, a population that includes more very young and very old people.

Here are the OECD’s laughably biased figures showing the effect of immigration on countries’ GDP both including pensions paid to immigrants and excluding them (click on chart to see more clearly):

But can we trust the OECD’s politically-correct conclusions?

Let’s start with the basic facts. Since 1997 over 4 million people have moved to Britain legally and maybe a million or two illegally. That’s more than 330,000 per year – more than a town the size of Milton Keynes or Derby every single year.

Now let’s look at things the grovelingly politically-correct OECD report didn’t consider.

1. In the Brown boom, about 2 million new jobs were created. Of these about 1.77 million went to immigrants. Assuming that a million of these could have been taken by British workers, that’s a million breadwinners on benefits. If these million Brits are claiming say £20,000 a year in benefits, housing allowances, council taxes etc then that’s £20bn in benefits – oooh, that’s 1% of GDP which more than wipes out the 0.5% of GDP that immigration is supposed to have contributed. Whoops!

2. We have had to provide housing for these more than 5 million immigrants. That has pushed up demand while supply has been limited and, of course, has pushed up prices. This has forced many younger Brits to rent instead of buying as they can’t afford the UK’s hugely-inflated house prices. If we crunch some numbers and assume that one million Brits are renting, when they’d like to buy and that they’re paying £500/month on rent, then that’s £6bn a year that’s being taken out of economy. Whoops, bet the OECD didn’t think about that.

3. Of the 2.3 million immigrants from the EU a worrying 24% (551,000) are not working and 6% (146,000) have never worked. I wonder if the OECD considered all the benefits they’ve been claiming?

4. About 150,000 British citizens emigrate from the UK every year. If we assume that one in four leaves because they’re unhappy with the UK’s immigration free-for-all and that these people spend £25,000 a year each in the countries where they settle, then that’s about £1bn a year the UK economy is losing.

But it’s not just the financial impacts that are important. There are quality of life problems with increasing the already overcrowded UK’s population by over 330,000 every year – pressure on transport, the NHS, schools where classes are mostly made up of children for whom English is not their first language, policing and other public services:

OECD says “immigration has been good for Britain”. Most people with any common sense would probably say “that’s total bull’s pizzle”.

(Oh, how I dream of the day that just a few people will buy copies of my latest book GREED UNLIMITED)