Cameron’s welfare restrictions for EU immigrants may have an impact, but not necessarily on numbers
Anna Sonny, 22 May 2015
David Cameron arrived in Riga, Latvia this morning for his first EU summit since his re-election. Although ongoing tensions in Ukraine will be high on the agenda, many will be expecting him to start making his case for reforming the EU, before the British public vote in a referendum.
Among the demands at the top of the list will be a block against the EU’s desire for ever closer union; a restriction on the benefits immigrants can receive in the UK; reducing regulation for businesses; more powers for national parliaments to block or opt out of EU legislation, and emergency brakes on immigration in the event of further enlargement of the 28 member bloc.
The discussion around the UK’s EU membership has revolved mostly around immigration and it is likely that winning the support of EU leaders for the reforms on welfare for immigrants will have a strong impact at home, in shaping the British public’s perception of Cameron as a robust leader who can fight for Britain’s best interests in Europe.
Cameron’s earlier pledge to bring net immigration in the UK down to tens of thousands found itself completely buried underneath one of the pillars of the EU: the free movement of people, which is unlikely to be restructured.
The recent immigration figures, showing that net immigration rose by 50% to 318,000 in 2014, reinforce the fact that it is impossible for the UK to control EU immigration by law at the European level; instead Cameron is now placing the restrictions on the inside, at the national level, to deter immigrants from coming in the first place. The treaty change Cameron is after to entrench these reforms is a sticking point and looks unlikely to be welcomed by Eastern EU members.
It is interesting to note that studies have shown EU immigrants do make a net contribution to the British economy – so the real difference these reforms will make economically and in terms of people coming in may be quite small. But perhaps it will be enough to abate Ukip’s claims that immigration is damaging the British economy and depressing wages, and will be enough to keep the immigration issue at bay.
“It is interesting to note that studies have shown EU immigrants do make a net contribution to the British economy ”
These studies are simply propaganda in the politically correct interest because they never take into account the true economic cost as these items are ignored:
1. The amount of income tax and National Insurance paid by immigrants. Because of the type of work involved – seasonal, work offered by foreign gangmasters and so on – it is reasonable to assume a disproportionately large proportion of those working in the black market are immigrants. There is also a practice of immigrants working and paying tax until they exceed the single person’s tax allowance in a tax year, ceasing to work in the UK for that tax year and then reclaiming all the income tax paid at the end of the tax year. That rebated tax needs to be deducted from the tax paid figure held by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
2. The costs arising from the native population who are denied jobs which immigrants have taken. This will involve the benefits native workers have to collect because they cannot find a job, the costs of having to move to a new area to either seek work or because the new benefits cap will not meet their rent and the costs of having to take children out of one school plus the costs of registering with a new GP because a family is forced to move .
3. The cost to the native population of a reduction in wages caused by immigrants increasing the pool of labour. This will mean less tax paid and more in-work benefits
4. The cost of benefits drawn by immigrants when they are not working.
5. The cost of benefits drawn by immigrants when they are working, for example, working tax credits, housing benefit.
6. The cost of NHS care given to immigrants.
7. The cost of education given to immigrants, this to include the additional costs arising from those with poor or non-existent English.
8. The cost of benefits, education and NHS care for the children of immigrants born in the UK.
9. The costs of benefits paid to immigrants to support children born abroad and living abroad.
10. The inflation of housing costs caused by immigrants and their children born in the UK increasing the demand for housing.
11. The costs involved in a decline in the quality of NHS care and educational standards because of the pressure placed on the NHS, schools and higher education by immigrants. The inadequate English of many immigrants employed in the NHS in particular must reduce the efficiency of the service and increase the likelihood of error. The difficulty of teaching in schools with huge numbers of pupils lacking English as a first language speaks for itself.
12. The costs involved in the British economy generally from a loss of efficiency through the inadequate English of immigrants and their lack of understanding of British customs. It may be cheaper for an employer to employ an immigrant in terms of wages, but, especially where the immigrant is dealing with the public, there must be a substantial the loss of efficiency in terms of extra time taken to conduct conversations with customers, misunderstandings of what is wanted and an inability to explain to customers what is on offer.
13. The loss of expertise to Britain of skilled Britons who seek work abroad because of opportunities the UK being blocked by immigrants, for example, newly qualified British doctors and nurses have encountered difficulty in obtaining British posts despite the frequent claims of NHS staff shortages (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9272640/New-doctors-will-face-unemployment.html), while positions at British medical schools are cut and large numbers of foreigners recruited (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2407585/NHS-recruits-thousands-doctors-Third-World–limits-places-deny-British-students-chance-study-medicine.html)
14. The costs – which can be lifelong – of the loss of work experience for Britons unable to get work at all, whether skilled or unskilled. This is particularly important for the young.
15. The costs in terms of wear and tear on the roads because of increased traffic arising from immigrants.
16. The cost of criminal activity amongst immigrants.
17. The cost of criminal activity amongst the descendants of immigrants.
18. The costs of guarding against Islamic terrorism.
19. The costs of the remittances made by immigrants and their descendants to their ancestral countries.
20. The costs of meeting the requirements of the “anti-racist” legislation which puts considerable burdens employers. These are particularly severe for any employer who is funded in whole or part by the taxpayer. Such employers have to not merely be non-discriminatory, but they have to prove that is what they are as a result of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/34/pdfs/ukpga_20000034_en.pdf). The police are particularly keen to show how PC they are (http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/edhr/2010/201001EDHREDH01.pdf)
21. The cost of dealing with visa requests, asylum claims, claims regarding family reunions and claims based on compassionate grounds. The costs include employing civil servants to process claims to stay in the UK, the cost of staffing of immigration tribunals, the costs arising from the court time taken by the cases which go to the courts, the legal costs of those trying to stay in the UK (which are normally paid by the taxpayer), the cost of running immigration detention centres and the cost of removing people from the UK .
22. The ongoing cost of the descendants of immigrants – potentially through many generations – of racial and ethnic groups who continue to display high levels of unemployment, high benefit dependency, low-skills, poor educational attainment, low payments of tax and abnormally high levels of criminality.
But it isn’t the economic costs which are most important. It is the non-economic ones which matter most because they corrode a society. These costs are:
1. The colonisation of parts of the UK, especially in England, for example, much of inner London, Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford by immigrants who create separate worlds in which to live with next to no attempt at integration. This makes living in such areas for native Britons very problematic, because not only will they feel they are a minority in their own land, a severe psychological burden, those native Britons who are parents will have a very real concern that the state schools (where the large majority of British pupils are educated) in their area will be Towers of Babel in which their children will be neglected, taught more of the cultures of immigrants than their own culture and quite probably bullied simply for being native Britons. The poorer native Britons in such areas will often not have the option of moving – as white liberals frequently do – to an area where there are few immigrants because of the cost of moving, especially the cost of housing. It is also much more difficult for someone in an unskilled or low-skilled occupation to find such work in areas without a large immigrant component.
2. The damaging effect on the morale of the native British population of seeing parts of their country colonised with the connivance of their elites.
3. The damaging effect on the morale of the native British population of employers and politicians claiming that immigrants are more able and possessed of a superior work ethic than the native Briton.
4. Immigrant Ghettoes. Their formation is a natural tendency amongst immigrants which was given a great deal of added energy by the British elite’s adoption of multiculturalism in the 1970s. This was both a consequence of the Left-Liberal internationalist terminally naïve happy-clappy “we are all one big human family” ideology and an attempt to ameliorate when it became clear that assimilation/integration had not taken place amongst the black and Asian immigrants of the fifties and sixties after several generations had been born in Britain. The effect has been to create long-lasting ghettoes which are not only separate from the British mainstream but hostile to Britain, its native population and its culture
5. Censorship. The need by the British elite to suppress dissent amongst the native population at the invasion of their country has resulted in a gross diminution of free speech. They have done this through legislation, for example, the Race Relations Act 1976, Public Order Act 1986 and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000; by creating a willingness amongst the police to intimidate by pouncing with the greatest zeal on those who dare to be any other than rigidly politically correct in the matter of race and immigration (this done frequently with no intention of bringing charges because no law on the statute book will fit the pc “crime” but simply to frighten), and through the complicity of those in the media and employers (especially public sector and large private employers) to punish the politically incorrect heretics with media hate campaigns or the loss of jobs.
6. Double standards in law enforcement. As mentioned above, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service show great eagerness in investigating and prosecuting cases when a white person (especially a white Briton) is accused of being racist on the flimsiest of evidence and a remarkable sloth where someone from a racial or ethnic minority group has been blatantly racist. The case of Rhea Page is an especially fine example of the latter behaviour whereby a vicious indubitably racist attack by Somali girls on a white English girl and her boyfriend did not result in a custodial sentence (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p.) The strong reluctance of the British state to act against crimes specific to ethnic and racial minorities can be particularly seen in the case of “honour killings”, Female Genital Mutilation and the clearly racist grooming of white girls by men from the Indian sub-continent.
7. The general privileging racial and ethnic minorities over the native British population. The incontinent pandering to immigrant cultures, especially Muslims, by politicians, public service organisations, large private businesses and much of the mainstream media. The pandering ranges from such material advantages as housing associations which cater only for specific ethnic and racial minorities (https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/) and a toleration of customs and morals which would be unreservedly declared to be wrong if practised by the native population, for example, the ritual slaughter of animals.
8. The incessant pc propagandising in schools and universities, even in subjects which do not seem to readily lend themselves to pc manipulation such as economics and geography. The most pernicious effect of this ideological corruption of schooling is to effectively rob native British (and especially English) children of their history. This occurs because the general history of Britain (and especially that of England) is not taught (there is no meaningful chronology of British or any other history delivered to children because themes rather than periods are the order of the day) and the history which is covered is heavily slanted towards portraying the British as pantomime villains forever oppressing subject peoples and growing rich on the wealth extracted from them. The upshot is the creation of several generations of native British (and especially English) children who have (1) no meaningful understanding of their history and general culture and (2) have acquired a sense that any praise of or pride in their own land, culture and history is dangerous and that the only safe way to get through school is to repeat the politically correct mantras of their teachers.
9. The piggy –backing on “anti-discrimination” laws to do with race of the other politically correct mainstays of sexual and gender equality and lesser entrants to the equality game such as age and disability. Racism is undoubtedly the most potent of all pc voodoo words and without it the present gigantic edifice of the “diversity and equality” religion would in all probability not exist, or would at least exist in much less potent form.
10. The claustrophobia of diversity (https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/the-claustrophobia-of-diversity/). A sense of paranoid claustrophobia (something common to totalitarian states) has been created amongst the native British population by the suppression of dissent about mass immigration and its consequences, by the imposition of the multiculturalist creed and by the ceaseless extolling of the “joy of diversity” by white liberals who take great care to live well insulated against the “joy”. The effect of this claustrophobia is to generally reduce the native British population to an ersatz acceptance of the pc message, but the discontent every now and then bubbles over into public outbursts such as those of Emma West (https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/). Such outbursts, which are a basic form of political protest, are increasingly visited with criminal charges and jail sentences.
11. The enemy within. The creation of large communities of those who are ethnically and racially different from the native British in Britain produces de facto fifth columns. We are already seeing how countries such as India and China respond to any attempt to restrict future immigration for these countries by making veiled threats about what will happen if Britain does this. At a less direct level of foreign threat, British foreign policy is increasingly shaped by the fact that there are large ethnic and racial minorities in Britain. There is also the growing numbers, especially amongst Muslims in Britain, of those who are actively hostile to the very idea of Britain and are willing to resort to extreme violence to express their hatred, actions such as the 7/7 bombings in London and the recent murder of the soldier Lee Rigby.
12. Violence based on ethnicity and behaviours peculiar to immigrant groups such as “honour” killings”, street gangs and riots. Every self-initiated British riot since 1945, that is a riot started by rioters not violence in response to police action against a crowd of demonstrators, has its roots in immigration. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 were the white response to large scale Caribbean immigration; every riot in Britain since then has been instigated and led by blacks or Asians from the Indian Sub-Continent. This includes the riots of 2011 in England which the politically correct British media have tried desperately to present as a riot which in its personnel was representative of modern England. In fact, it began with the shooting of a mixed race man in North London by police and even the official statistics on the race and ethnicity of those convicted of crimes in the riots show that blacks and Asians comprised more than fifty percent of those brought to book (https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-black-instigated-and-dominated-2011-riots-and-the-great-elite-lie/).
13. Uncontrolled immigration. The larger the number of immigrants, the louder voice they have, the greater the electoral power. This in practice means ever more immigration as politicians pander to immigrant groups by allowing them to bring in their relatives or even simply more from their ethnic group. This trait has been amplified by the British political elite signing treaties since 1945 which obligate Britain to take large numbers of asylum seekers and give hundreds of millions of people in Europe the right to reside and work in Britain through Britain’s membership of the EU. Britain cannot even deport illegal immigrants with any ease because either the originating countries will not take them or British courts grant them rights to remain because of Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights. The overall effect is to create de facto open borders immigration to the UK.
14. The introduction of ethnic based voting. This is phenomenon which is in its infancy as a serious threat, but it can already be found in areas with a large population of Asians whose ancestral land is the India sub continent. This is a recipe for eventual racial and ethnic strife.
15. The corruption of the British electoral system. Voter fraud had been rare in Britain for more than a hundred years before the Blair Government was formed in 1997. This was partly because of the general culture of the country and partly because of the way elections were conducted (with the vast majority of votes having to be cast in person) made fraudulent voting difficult. The scope for postal voting was extended from special cases such as the disabled and the old to any elector by the Representation of the People Act 2000. The frauds which have been discovered since the extension of the postal vote have been disproportionately amongst Asians whose ancestral origin were in the Indian sub-continent (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1271457/General-Election-2010-Postal-vote-fraud-amid-fears-bogus-voters-swing-election.html). The influence of fraudulent voting could be substantial because around 20% of votes cast in the 2010 General Election were postal http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/105896/Plymouth-GE2010-report-web.pdf).
Read more at
https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/the-non-economic-costs-of-mass-immigration-to-the-uk/