Douglas Carswell

Revealed: 1 in 7 on working tax benefit is a migrant

Migrants, we keep being told, are much less likely to claim benefits than Brits.

Really?

"Oh, yes", insist the ''experts''. UK nationals, they repeatedly tell us, are twice as likely to be claiming benefits as foreigners. Anyone who dares question this ''fact'', as I discovered the other week, gets howled down by supposed "experts" on Twitter.

The assertion that migrants are much less likely to claim benefits than UK nationals turns out to be just that. An assertion. Far from being evidence-based, the evidence turns out to be remarkably flimsy.

To be clear, there is data from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that suggests that twice as many Brits claim Jobseekers Allowance (JSA), and other out-of-work benefits, compared to non-UK nationals in proportion to the size of the population. But it is ridiculous to jump to the conclusion that Brits are therefore twice as likely to claim benefits as non-Brits.

The "experts" who make such claims have failed to look at all the evidence. Those who insist that migrants are less likely to claim benefits tend to draw their data from the Labour Force Survey, which relies on respondents reporting claims to benefits, rather than actual data on claims made.

New evidence produced by Michael O'Connor, not previously in the public domain, looks at in work benefits, and HMRC data. Michael has crunched the numbers and his data seems to show a strikingly different picture.

• Migrants are more likely to be claiming working tax credit than the rest of the population. Indeed, they are 20 percent more likely to be claiming working tax credit that the rest of the population.
• There are nearly half a million migrants claiming working tax credit in the UK.
• One in seven (14.5 percent) claiming working tax credit is a non-UK national.
• More than one in six (17.6 percent) claiming both working tax credit and child tax credit is a non-UK national.
• More migrants claim working tax credit than claim all of the main out-of-work benefits together.

Don't get me wrong. I have enormous admiration for individuals wanting to come to this country to make the best of their lives. Switzerland, a country with a far higher standard of living than ours, has a much higher number of migrant workers (one in five of the work force) than we do. From 13th-century Venice, to 17th-century Holland, to 21st-century London and California, those parts of the planet able to attract the brightest and the best, flourish.

But if we are to attract the brightest and the best – rather than relatively unskilled benefit migrants – we need to have an open and honest debate about the kind of immigration we currently have.

The claim that migrants are half as likely to claim benefits as UK nationals turns out to be a myth.

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