One INSANE number you need to know

The disaster that’s about to unfold in Britain’s immigration system

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MATT GOODWIN

I don’t know about you but sometimes I find that when numbers become really big I struggle to make sense of them. Like when a government minister is on television talking about billions for this or trillions for that. I just kind of zone out.

But this week I encountered one truly enormous number that did not have that effect. On the contrary, it sparked intense feelings of panic, alarm and bewilderment. “Surely that can’t be right … can it?”, I found myself saying out loud.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the estimated cost that is about to be imposed on hardworking British families, British workers and British taxpayers if a specific glitch within our immigration system is not fixed —and fixed urgently.

The number?

Well, you might want to brace yourself.

It’s £234 BILLION.

That’s right. £234 billion in costs to British taxpayers over the next few decades unless we urgently change course by change something in our immigration system.

If you want to make sense of how a few policy wonks at the Centre for Policy Studies arrived at this number and how we might avoid this looming disaster then we need to begin by turning the clock back.

We need to return to the time of the Covid pandemic, when so-called ‘conservative’ prime minister, Boris Johnson, betrayed his own voters and the country.

Our long-time readers will remember what happened —the ‘Big Tory Lie’.

After promising the British people that he would replace the uncontrolled free movement of EU migrants with a ‘high-skill’ immigration policy that would be built around “lower overall numbers”, Boris Johnson then did the exact opposite.

He betrayed the British people by flooding these islands with unprecedented numbers of low-skill, low-wage migrant workers, nearly all of whom have come from outside Europe —from culturally different if not incompatible nations.

Between 2021 and 2024, astonishingly, Britain handed out more than 2 million visas.

Most of them went to rocket scientists, doctors and engineers from America, Canada, and Australia, right? Not quite.

On the contrary, most went to low-skill, low-wage, and poorly educated workers from outside Europe, as well as their relatives.

This Substack was one of the first places in Britain to point to the glaring failure of this policy, drawing together a lot of evidence to explain why the model of mass immigration that we are now pursuing is, actually, bad economics.

It’s making us poorer, not richer, and is undermining our prosperity by flooding the country with migrants who are a net fiscal cost, not a net fiscal benefit.

And since then, the pile of evidence to support our argument has just got bigger and bigger, not only here in Britain but across the Western world.

In Germany, for example, we now know that half the immigrants who arrived during the crisis of 2015-16 are still living on benefits. In Denmark, non-Western immigrants cost the country £3.6 billion in 2018, or 1.4% of the country’s entire GDP.

In the Netherlands, the net lifetime costs of asylum-seekers are estimated to be £400,000 per migrant while one study puts the annual cost of non-Western migration to the Dutch people at an eye-watering €17 billion.

And now, here in Britain, a new report by the Centre for Policy Studies has added to this, throwing full light on just how insane our immigration policy has become.

Take a look at the table below, which highlights the total madness that was started by Boris Johnson and is now being carried on by the equally hapless Keir Starmer.

While Boris Johnson and other useless Tories like Priti Patel prattled on and on about turning Britain into an oasis for skilled workers, the blunt reality is that between 2021 and 2024 skilled workers comprised just 5.4% of all long-term visas Britain issued.

Of the nearly 4 million visas that were issued, skilled workers comprised just 204,000. In other words, just one in every twenty people who came to Britain on long-term visas between 2021 and 2024 were skilled workers —which is completely insane!

Even more remarkably, these 204,000 skilled workers brought in a further 156,000 relatives who also often earn less than average, if they are even working at all.

And at the same time, Britain handed out visas to a further 270,000 low-skill, low-wage workers in the social care system who, astonishingly, brought some 377,000 relatives with them! That’s right. 377,000 relatives! It’s completely absurd.

Not only is the incompetent British state continuing to maintain a completely broken and rotten model of social care in this country by flooding the system with cheap migrant workers from overseas—which means providers don’t have to pay higher wages and the government doesn’t have to reform the sector—but the state is also piling even more pressure on our fraying public services and economy by handing out hundreds of thousands of visas to the relatives of these low-skilled workers from radically different nations, such as Nigeria, Zimbabwe, China, Pakistan, and India.

And alongside all of that, in the same period Britain handed out 1.7 million visas to international students who brought some 344,000 relatives (!) with them.

Many of these students, as the research shows, enrol on short, one-year courses at financially unsustainable non-elite universities before switching over to work in low-pay, low-skill jobs that do not even require a university degree, thereby further eroding our economy and pushing us even further away from becoming the high-skill, highly productive and genuinely prosperous nation we all want to live in.

So, what we are left with, as even the Office for Budget Responsibility has since admitted, alongside basically every serious person except pro-immigration extremists such as Professors Jon Portes and Robert Ford, are masses of low-wage migrants who are a net fiscal cost, requiring more in spending than they are generating in tax.

This, clearly, is one big reason why our economy is currently flatlining, with low growth, low productivity, and declining GDP-per-capita. The core problem is shown in the graph below. Britain, basically, has been flooded with too many low-wage migrants who are represented by the yellow line, who are a net fiscal cost.

It is, again, completely insane. None of this makes any sense. None of this reflects a system that’s in control and making sound choices that work for the British people.

And as if the political betrayal is not bad enough, then comes something else. Which is the fact that, in just a few months from now, from January 2026, these new arrivals, about 1.7 million of them, will become eligible to claim something called ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ —in other words, to stay in Britain permanently.

Through the ‘Indefinite Leave to Remain’ rules, once immigrants have been in Britain for five years they will be allowed to remain here for good.

Furthermore, they get full access to the National Health Service (NHS), social housing, universal credit, benefits, the right to apply for student loans and university grants, the right to bring relatives to join them who then, in turn, claim Indefinite Leave to Remain, the right to apply for British citizenship after another year, and the right to British citizenship for any of their children who are born on these islands.

In this way, the costs for British taxpayers will now continue to multiply as low-wage, low-skill migrant workers and their relatives from outside Europe who are already a net fiscal cost then get Indefinite Leave to Remain and bring in more relatives, all of whom will then get older, becoming more dependent on things like social housing, public services, and the welfare state, with the costs of all this going through the roof.

And what’s absolutely astonishing, as Karl Williams points out, is that nobody in the Tory or Labour governments, or for that matter the British state, appears to have even started to think about what impact all this will have on public services and spending (much like I’ve not seen anybody analyse how Britain is going to manage the 10 million people who are forecast to arrive here between today and the year 2047).

The only people who have, as far as I can see, is the Centre for Policy Studies who estimate that, unless we change this policy, then between 742,000 and 1.2 million recent migrants will become eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain.

This would see between 570 and 1,000 people being granted Indefinite Leave to Remain every day, compared to a rate of around 327 each day in the 2010s.

If Britain remains committed to mass immigration and continues to give these rights away like a free lunch, in other words, then the country will see three times as many migrants being allowed to stay indefinitely than it saw during the 2010s.

And the lifetime net fiscal cost to the British state, to British taxpayers, of allowing this many migrants to receive Indefinite Leave to Remain will simply be enormous —an estimated £234 BILLION over the next few decades —equivalent to a bill of £8,200 for every UK household, or more than four times what we spend on defence in a year.

Our leaders could stop this from happening if they wanted to.

They could say that Britain simply cannot afford to give permanent settlement and then citizenship to millions of people who cost the country more than they contribute.

Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, for example, if she was serious about her party’s dubious claim to be ‘tough on immigration’, could change the rules ahead of 2026 by extending or even suspending the right to claim Indefinite Leave to Remain, much like her Labour predecessors tinkered with the same rules in

Our leaders could also enact many other changes to ensure our immigration policy is helping to build, rather than undermine, a prosperous economy.

They could extend the length of time that’s needed for immigrants to obtain Indefinite Leave to Remain to at least fifteen years, if not longer.

They could force migrants who want to receive Indefinite Leave to Remain to show at least 10-15 years of tax returns, making clear they have been net contributors for a long time —that they, like the British people, have paid into the collective pot.

They could introduce new criteria when distributing visas, ensuring they only go to high-skilled, educated, productive, young workers who are much more likely to make a net contribution to the British economy over the course of their lives.

And they could do all these things to convey an even deeper point —that going ahead with the mass permanent resettlement of potentially millions of people from overseas who will impose net fiscal costs on the British people that will run into the hundreds of billions is not just bad economics but morally unjust.

It is neither not right nor fair to impose these costs on the hardworking, tax-paying British public, whose families have contributed to these islands for generations.

Both the Tories and the Labour government —the Uniparty—got us into this mess to begin with, presiding over an extreme policy that the vast majority of people in this country neither support nor ever voted for.

And it is now up to them to get us out of this looming disaster, otherwise I suspect an insurgent Nigel Farage and Reform party will only continue to go from strength to strength, highlighting this glaring failure on the part of the established class at every major event, rally, conference, and set of elections between today and 2029.

So if you’re listening, Uniparty, why don’t you do yourself a favour and extend the Indefinite Leave to Remain, save British taxpayers hundreds of billions and begin to repair your relationship with a country you clearly struggle to understand.

You’ve already created one disaster in this country by opening the floodgates to mass uncontrolled low-skill immigration; while the clock is ticking you still have time to stop another disaster from unfolding.

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This article (One INSANE number you need to know) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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