Douglas Carswell

The "experts" are wrong about immigration

For years, the debate about immigration has been dominated by "experts".

Complex and inaccessible data was used by remote academics. They crunched the numbers and drew the conclusions. The rest of us had to take it on trust that the facts sustained what they told us.

Take the recent report by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (Cream). The data, declares their report, shows migrants are "less likely to receive benefits ... than UK natives". And they "made a considerable net positive contribution to the UK's fiscal system".

End of conversation. The people with the PhDs agree. It must be so.

But hang on. Does this report sustain these conclusions? Let's use this internet thingy to deconstruct what the "experts" declare.

1. How does the report work out what migrants contribute in tax?  With some school boyish errors, it would seem.

Take for example business rates. They generate something like £10 billion a year for the Exchequer – and as everyone ought to know, that £10 billion of tax revenue comes largely from big business.

But as Michael O'Connor points out, the report appears to credit business rates as a fiscal contribution – worth what appears to amount to £2,500 each – from every self-employed individual in the country.  That is simply wrong. 

Yet doing so massively distorts the fiscal balance sheet, since we know that EU migrants are far more likely to declare themselves as self-employed. (Indeed, if you come from Romania or Bulgaria, you often have to call yourself self-employed to
be allowed in).

2. How does the report assess the contribution of migrants in terms of company and capital taxes?  By guessing, it seems.

Company and capital taxes represent about 9 per cent of the UK tax base.  To work out what share comes from migrants, the report allocates a share to migrants on the "implicit assumption that company ownership (i.e. share ownership) is similarly
distributed between the native and immigrant population".

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not. But to me that sounds like guessing.

3. What data does the Cream report use?  Labour Force Survey data, which is drawn from what information folk give about what they are claiming. It is not cross checked with what they might actually be claiming.

While Labour Force Survey data suggests migrants are less likely to claim out of work benefits, HMRC data shows they are significantly more likely to claim working tax and child tax credit.

4. How does the Cream paper assess the benefits paid to migrants?  By conflating benefits and tax credit – and, worse, by assuming everyone gets the same amount.

If, for example, a Brit get £20 a week child benefit, and a migrant gets £80 a week tax credit, the report treats them as together getting £100, which it nets out as £50 each.

Why does this matter?

5. The report fails to factor in data we have about different migrant groups very different claiming patterns. Michael O'Connor highlights work by Drinkwater and Robinson in 2013.

Migrants from Poland, Estonia, Latvia or Hungary, for example, are less likely to claim (relatively low) unemployment benefits – but significantly more likely to claim (relatively high) tax credits or housing benefit.

In other words, this is not simply methodological nit picking. It could undermine the claim that European Economic Area migrants contribute 34 percent more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

Not for the first time, I suspect a report written by "experts" tell us more about what "experts" think than it does about the way things actually are.

No doubt I will get the usual stream of angry tweets from angry Lefties, demanding that I defer to the "experts" and the academics. But I have read what they wrote, and indeed read some of what they themselves read. Which is precisely why I do not defer to them. Thanks to the internet, we do not need "experts" to tell us what to think anymore.

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