For a few short post-Brexit years, it looked as if Britain might have stopped worrying about immigration for good. Our “points-based” system was meant to attract the best and brightest from around the world, solving the problem of “mass, uncontrolled” immigration from the EU.
Four million arrivals later, the number of people who say immigration is the most important issue facing the country is as high as it was in June 2016, according to YouGov.
Objections to the cultural aspects of immigration, typified by flag-hoisting protests, have been obvious and angry. Yet polling by More in Common suggests that fears over immigration are more likely to be influenced by economic factors — public services, health, housing — than cultural problems like integration. But exactly how has the post-2021 “Boriswave” affected those services?
Measuring migration’s impact on services — especially immediately after a pandemic — is difficult. What we do know is that asylum seekers, particularly small boat arrivals, are much more expensive to the state, per person, than those who come here by regular routes. Britain spent £4.3 billion in 2023 on asylum support, on top of any future benefit payments.
But small boat arrivals, and asylum seekers more widely, made up just 4 and 11 per cent of arrivals in 2024. The direct impact of recent immigration on social housing, for example, is minimal: only 2 per cent of new tenancies went to successful asylum seekers last year.
By contrast, the vast majority of migrants coming to Britain have no recourse to public funds and must wait at least five years to apply for indefinite leave to remain. They have to pay a surcharge to use the NHS — and because of their young age may be less likely to use it anyway. In 2015 Oxford academics found that immigration actually reduced waiting times for outpatient referrals and made no difference to A&E delays. Healthier immigrants, they suggested, were displacing unhealthier native populations.
Today there is no clear evidence that areas with lots of migrants had long NHS waiting times. But while working migrants may be less likely to burden the NHS at first, there may be more pressure later on: a third of live births in 2023 were to foreign-born mothers.
Let us try to put a number on all the above. By reducing the burden of people on the state to a single figure — “net fiscal impact” — the OBR calculates how much money migrants contribute over their lifetime to the Treasury. For most of us the contribution cycle goes like this. After birth we fall into negative territory, benefiting from the NHS and schooling, before paying back our “debt” in the form of taxes while working for 45 years. After retirement, our contribution falls again because of the state pension and greater use of the NHS.
For migrants, though — whom the OBR assumes arrive aged 25 — that early debt to the state is skipped. If they are in a well-paid job, they contribute almost immediately through taxes.
Crucially, though, that contribution hinges entirely on earnings. Migrants on the average wage (about £37,000 for a full-time worker) contribute more to the public purse than UK-born workers because we don’t have to pay for their early years. Yet someone consistently earning half that would have cost the state £582,000 by age 80. An asylum seeker not working, or working in a job that somehow facilitates not paying tax, could end up costing even more.
HMRC figures show that last year the average employed skilled visa-holder earned £56,600, making him or her a solid net contributor, while health and care visa-holders earned £30,900. But dependants, who represent about a quarter of arrivals, are paid less: working dependants of health visa-holders made just £22,100 a year, and plenty, including children, were not working at all.
This is a simplification: it does not take into account the impact those migrants make on public services with their jobs (two in five new doctors were trained overseas), plus it ignores the fact that earnings increase over time.
But there is a bigger problem with looking at migration in this transactional way. The idea of a “net contribution” implies that migrants’ taxes are reinvested in things that make their arrival less burdensome: more doctors, houses, police officers and so on. In reality that often doesn’t happen. When the OBR tweaked its forecasts last year to take into account rising immigration, an extra £6.2 billion in tax revenue from migrants was not reallocated into public services or welfare budgets: it simply resulted in less government borrowing.
The direct link between failing public services and immigration may be hard to pin down, yet we are all capable of basic maths.
Since we voted to leave the EU, our population has grown by about 6 per cent. In that same period the number of full-time GPs has fallen by 5 per cent, and the number of local authority-funded homes is down by more than 2 per cent. Compared with the average European country, Britain is “missing” four million homes, according to the Centre for Cities: the truth is that when immigration boomed in the early 2000s, Britain simply kept on building at the same rate as before.
Most new migrants seem to pay as much in tax as the average worker, if not more. Yet that does not help public services if governments do not reinvest that money to accommodate the growing population. Britain built an immigration system it was not prepared for: no wonder the country feels full.