Sir, Your editorial on the inquiry I chaired into the economic impact of immigration claimed that we made “highly charged claims” that Britain lost out from immigration “while essentially guessing the numbers” (April 2). This is nonsense.

One of our main conclusions is indeed on the need to improve the present inadequate statistics. However, the available evidence shows that the benefits are small and close to zero — not negative.

This is based on the effect on GDP per head, which measures people’s living standards. Total GDP, which the Government continues to cite as evidence of huge economic benefits, is meaningless because immigration obviously increases not only GDP but also the population. China has a bigger GDP than Britain but that tells us nothing about its relative living standards.

GDP per head is an average and we point out that there are winners and losers from immigration but overall the costs and benefits are small. The lowest paid, many of whom are former immigrants or the children of immigrants, suffer a slightly negative effect on wages from immigration.

We are concerned that high immigration could discourage employers from investing in adequate training for those who leave school at 16 and don’t get jobs — a danger acknowledged by the Government. We are also concerned about the pressures in some areas on housing, schools and other services.

Of course, employers support high immigration. They naturally want access to low cost labour. But it is the responsibility of Government to balance that demand with all the other factors set out in our report.

You suggest that we argued for a “cap” on immigrant numbers. In fact, we recommend something different and more flexible: a target range for net immigration. It is important to recognise that, under any conceivable scenario, large numbers of immigrants will continue to come to Britain. We explicitly acknowledge in our report the contribution immigrants make — and will certainly continue to make. That will still be the case even if the level of gross immigration — which has averaged just under 500,000 a year since 1997 — is brought nearer to balance with emigration (which has averaged just over 300,000).

Lord Wakeham
House of Lords

Sir, Originally, the Home Office calculations gave the fiscal benefit of immigration as £2.5 billion per year. Subsequent analysis of the Home Office’s calculations showed that an error once removed reduced the benefit to virtually zero. Earlier calculations in Canada, the US and the Netherlands had come to the same conclusion. The Government used its original figure of £2.5 billion relentlessly in its support of unrestrained immigration, although it has now dropped this claim.

All the four estimates from the four countries mentioned omitted any cost calculations associated with infrastructure. This cost includes housing, transport, congestion, health, police, education and not least the disruption of communities.

The argument that immigration keeps down costs is short term at best and may well be wrong as we can probably import the same goods more cheaply. In addition immigrants repatriate money to their native countries. Four years ago the net repatriation of money (mainly to South Asia) was about £1 billion. Since then new countries have joined the EU and this figure will probably have increased significantly. The Poles were last year repatriating, for instance, at the rate of just less than £1 billion per year if one allows for unregistered transfers.

Michael Salt
Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Explore Letters

• Feedback