COSTS AND BENEFITS OF MIGRATION TO THE UK

UK Prime Minister and Home Secretary on raid of suspected illegal migrants - Picture Slough Express

David Cameron and Teresa May joined a police raid of suspected illegal migrants in Slough yesterday as the government announced a crackdown on migrants' access to unemployment benefit - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10996721/David-Cameron-announces-immigration-benefits-crackdown.html

It is very difficult to have an objective, robust, but nuanced, debate about the costs and benefits of migration to the UK, although a good starting point for such a discourse is Oxford University's Migration Observatory - http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/ My position, incidentally, is similar to that taken in this BBC article - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25880373 - entitled "More or Less: Calculating how much migrants cost or benefit a nation". The article considers the costs and benefits of migration in the UK and wider global context. With regard to the UK, migrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) are identified as net contributors to the national economy in the decade to 2011, but if total migration (ie from within and outside the EEA) to the UK over the period 1995-2011 is considered then "...immigration has been a drain on the public purse". Moreover, the benefits of mass migration, of the kind the UK has seen from some European Union countries, is likely to be short-term because "a good proportion of those people who have been in the UK for some time are likely to be older than the most recent immigrants, and so are more likely to be on benefits and using health services....".

Yesterday's announcements focused on illegal or "undocumented" migrants (whose numbers "oscillate between 417,000 and 863,000, including a population of UK-born children ranging between 44,000 and 144,000" according to work by the London School of Economics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_in_the_United_Kingdom) and EU migrants claiming unemployment benefit. A Home Office campaign to crackdown on illegal migration last year drew criticism from within and outside the government -  http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/28/vince-cable-attacks-crackdown-on-illegal-immigrants-as-stupid-and-offensive-3901527/ It followed an earlier report by the House of Commons Public Administration Committee - http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/28/uk-immigration-figures-little-better-than-a-guess-3901272/ - that immigration figures are "little better than a guess". Lack of robust information about undocumented and legal migration is certainly a problem, as is the conflation of issues around EU migrants claiming state benefits. The real issue is not the number of people claiming unemployment benefit (which is relatively small) but the growing number of migrant families eligible for the full range of other UK state benefits.

The structure of the UK economy means that many jobs are effectively subsidised by the state through in work and family benefits paid to employees. Indeed this situation might well be described as Britain's new "social contract" - the old one is described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Contract_%28Britain%29 - in which migration is a key and increasingly contested part.