Shouldn’t we expect immigrants to contribute more to our society?

In Sunday’s Torygraph, there was an article quoting an EU study showing there were over 600,000 Non-British EU citizens claiming unemployment and other benefits in Britain. The Government claims it doesn’t know how much we pay these people in benefits as their nationality is (conveniently for our masters?) not recorded when they claim their benefits. However, we do know that the level of unemployment amongst some European nationals living in Britain is quite high:

Moreover my back of a fag packet calculation suggests that these people, the vast majority of whom will never have contributed anything to our country in taxes, are costing us somewhere between £6,000,000,000 and £12,000,000,000 in benefits a year. That’s enough money to pay for around 200,000 nurses or police or troops. What they’re costing us in schooling, healthcare, policing, social services, translation and many other costs doesn’t bear thinking about. Curiously, the costs of these unemployed EU migrants are never mentioned by those (the BBC and the Labour Party) attacking the budget squeeze on the NHS, the police or the military.

Furthermore, we know that unemployment amongst ethnic communities is much higher than for British

Also in the newspapers was a heart-warming story of a lady from an Asian background whose life was saved through receiving a kidney transplant from a baby that had just died of heart failure. So in today’s blog, I’d like to shine a little light on a rather sensitive side of the immigration debate – the participation of ethnic minorities in kidney transplants in British hospitals, both as donors and receivers.

Accepted research has shown that people from Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities are 3 to 4 time more likely to suffer from kidney failure than white British . This is due to a much higher prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes amongst the UK’s Asian and Afro-Caribbean population. This has led to a situation where these two communities make up 8% of the population but 23% of those waiting for a kidney transplant. Yet these communities only account for less than 3% of all kidney donations.

The Asian community accounts for just 1% of donations, but 8% of all recipients and 14% of those on the waiting list for a transplant. The Afro-Caribbean community provides less than 1% of donations, but 3% of recipients and 6% of those on the waiting list for a new kidney.

The situation for donations of other organs would reveal a similar picture. To quote a study conclusion: “The UK Potential Donor Audit shows a 32% family refusal rate for White families and 74% refusal rate among non-White families when asked if they would donate organs.”

If we are ever to have an honest debate about whether uncontrolled immigration is good for or harmful to Britain, we need to have the facts about what immigration costs us and what contribution immigrant communities make. As far as their overall levels of economic activity or things like kidney transplants are concerned, our main immigrant communities seem to get an awful lot more from Britain than they contribute.