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Press Releases for June 2009
June 16, 2009
Migrationwatch comment on GLA report on illegal immigration issued today.
June 1, 2009
Immigrants send £4 billion a year home. Remittances rise to £11m a day
Full Text of Releases : June 2009
Migrationwatch comment on GLA report on illegal immigration issued today.
'These are very expensive proposals which would only make a bad situation worse. On the report’s own figures they would cost £300m in bureaucracy and £3m a week in benefits (our figure is £10m a week. See also (Briefing Paper 11.11- The True Cost of an Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants). It would also cost £6bn to provide the extra social housing needed.
Worse still, it would encourage still further illegal immigration as other countries have found. Italy has granted five amnesties in the last twenty years and Spain six; on virtually every occasion there were more applications each time. The report has no answer to this. it just remarks that it would only happen if border controls were ineffective.
But that is exactly the position we still face. We issue two million visas a year and there will be no full checks on departure until 2014, obviously, those granted an amnesty would be replaced at the drop of a hat.
The public have the common sense to see this. Our opinion poll showed seventy per cent opposed to an amnesty.
The recent European elections must surely be a lesson to the political class that they can no longer ride roughshod over public opinion with absurd, expensive and self-defeating proposals such as these. It seems that Boris Johnson is trying to buy the immigrant vote with taxpayer's money. They will know how to respond to this.'
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Immigrants send £4 billion a year home. Remittances rise to £11m a day
New research (Briefing Paper 1.23 published today shows that immigrants are now sending home a record £4 billion a year – almost doubling over the last decade – that is almost £11 million a day.
This figure is nearly two thirds the amount that the UK Government spends on overseas aid - £6.3 billion in 2008. In comparison, £4 billion is approximately the cost of the two new aircraft carriers planned for the Royal Navy. Furthermore, even this sum is likely to be an underestimate as it does not include money sent from the UK by unofficial banking channels.
‘We are not suggesting that remittances should be stopped, they are an important source of revenue for many families across the world, but claims that there are only positive economic benefits from mass immigration are clearly untrue and factors such as we describe here clearly point in the opposite direction,’ said Sir Andrew Green, chairman of think tank Migrationwatch who produced the report.
This research joins a growing body of work that has highlighted the economic ‘benefits’ claimed by supporters of record immigration levels are at best illusory.
For example last year the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs found “no evidence” that net immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population. The Government’s own evidence showed that the benefit of immigration is marginal – annual extra production equivalent to just 62p per head a week.
Said Sir Andrew: ‘For years we have been told that immigration can only benefit the economy. But when the evidence is examined, that claim falls apart. As employment of foreign born workers has risen, employment of UK born workers has fallen. And now we find that remittances have shot up as immigrants have sent savings home. So much for the benefits of uncontrolled immigration.’
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