The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

by Douglas Murray

Away from the spin, what UCL’s own research quietly showed was that non-EEA migrants had actually taken out around £95 billion more in services than they had paid in in taxes, meaning that if you took the period 1995–2011 and included all immigrants (not just a convenient high net-worth selection), then by UCL’s own measurements, immigrants to the United Kingdom had taken out significantly more than they had put in. Mass migration, in other words, had made the country very significantly poorer over the period in question. After some criticism for its methodology, manner of spinning and burial of crucial data, the following year UCL published its completed findings. By that point, and taking into account only UCL’s own figures, the results were even starker. For the full report showed that the earlier figure of £95 billion far understated the cost of immigration to Britain. In fact, immigrants over that 1995–2011 period had cost the United Kingdom a figure more like £114 billion, with the final figure potentially rising to as high as £159 billion. Needless to say, the discovery that immigration had actually cost the UK more than a hundred billion pounds did not make the news and nobody was made aware on their news bulletins of a headline that should have read, ‘Recent immigrants to the UK cost British taxpayers more than £100 billion’. How could they have done when the crucial findings didn’t even make it into the conclusions of the publication that had discovered them?5