Is the EU exporting its unemployed to Britain? And will they bankrupt us?

Politicians and journalists will play around with the statistics around immigration – usually to try to claim that immigration is “under control”, “good for Britain”, “beneficial for our economy” and “an enrichment to our cultural life”. But they won’t ever talk about the real trends and costs in immigration – shortage of housing, pressure on schools, hospitals and policing and drain on our benefits system.

So I’ve started trying to see what the immigration figures are really telling us. To measure immigration I’ve used the Government’s figures for the number of foreigners registering for National Insurance (NI) numbers each year.

My first chart shows the overall number broken down by region of origin (click to see more clearly)

The first thing you’ll notice is that the number of migrants getting NI numbers went up from about 340,000 a year in 2002/03 to about 420,000 a year in 2004/05 – a rise of over 40,000 a year. Then the number shot up from 420,000 a year in 2004/05 to almost 800,000 a year by 2007/08 – a massive rise of about 130,000 a year. This was due to people from the A8 accession countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia) moving to Britain.

Then the numbers of foreigners getting NI numbers “stabilised” at a fairly shocking 600,000 to 700,000 a year – that’s an incredible 12,000 to 14,000 a week (2,400 to 2,800 every working day). However, when the 29 million people from Romania and Bulgaria get full rights to move freely to Britain for work or benefits (or both), we can expect the number of migrants getting NI numbers to shoot up again to close to 900,000 or even 1,000,000 a year.

The next thing that is interesting is the rise in the numbers of migrants from the bankrupt Club Med countries since they collapsed into recession

And also the level of unemployment of migrants from Club Med countries compared to British Nationals

It seems pretty clear that the EU is exporting its unemployed to Britain and that these migrants (apart from those from Italy) are much more likely to be claiming benefits than British nationals.

Finally, here are unemployment levels amongst people from the last lot of Accession Countries

Heaven knows what will happen when the Romanians and Bulgarians start flooding in.

So, in answer to the two questions in the title:

Is the EU exporting its unemployed to Britain? Yes!

Will they bankrupt us? Probably.