All efforts to make an economic case for mass immigration rely on this trick. Among those to have used it are EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström and UN Representative Peter Sutherland. In a 2012 piece they suggested that unless Europe opens its borders to mass migration, ‘Entrepreneurs, migrants with Ph.Ds’ and others will all be ‘flocking to places like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, China, and India’, thus leaving Europe to be a more impoverished place.²

One of the few studies in this area is from the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London. It is a study that is widely cited. In 2013 the centre published a working paper titled ‘The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK’. This working paper (rather than finished report) was exceptionally widely covered in the media. The BBC ran the story as a lead item with the headline: ‘Recent immigrants to UK “make net contribution”’. The story claimed that far from being a ‘drain’ on the system, the financial contribution of ‘recent immigrants’ to the country had instead been ‘remarkably strong’.³ Following the lead of UCL’s own positively spun press release, the national media focused on the claim that ‘the recent waves of immigrants – i.e., those who arrived to the UK since 2000 and who have thus driven the stark increase in the UK’s foreign born population’, had ‘contributed far more in taxes than they received in benefits’.⁴

Elsewhere the study made the claim that far from being a cost to the taxpayer, immigrants were in fact ‘less likely’ to be a financial burden on the state than the people of the country they were moving into. It also claimed that recent migrants were less likely to need social housing than British people and were even 45 per cent less likely to be receiving state benefits or tax credits than ‘UK natives’. Doubtless some members of the public hearing this claim wondered when all the Somalis, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had managed to put so much money into the exchequer. But the study had performed the usual sleight of hand. It had presented the best-off and least culturally strange immigrants as in fact being typical immigrants. So the UCL study focused attention on ‘highly-educated immigrants’ and in particular on recent immigrants from the European Economic Area (the EU, plus Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein). The working paper highlighted the fact that these people paid 34 per cent more in taxes than they received in benefits while native British people paid 11 per cent less in taxes than they received in benefits. Anybody doubting the financial benefits of mass immigration was suddenly opposed to wealthy residents of Lichtenstein transferring to the United Kingdom for work.

Yet anyone who wanted to delve into this working paper would discover that the reality was wholly different from the spin that the media, and even the university from which it hailed, had given to the findings. For although UCL’s own estimate suggested that ‘recent migrants from the EEA between 2001 and 2011 had contributed around £22 billion into the UK economy’, the fiscal impact of all migrants, regardless of origin, told an entirely different story. Indeed ‘recent’ arrivals from the EEA were the sole migrants for whom such a positive claim could be made. 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.