Migrants are draining our welfare system. Here’s how we fix that
Imagine if almost a billion pounds in Universal Credit was being claimed each month by households containing foreign nationals.
What if more than three-quarters of a million foreign-born tenants were occupying social housing in this country, with almost half of London’s social housing taken up by this group?
You don’t need to imagine any of this. It’s happening now.
Britain’s welfare system was designed to support citizens in need. Instead, it has increasingly become a way for large numbers of immigrants to live among us at our expense.
For years, we were told migration was the price we had to pay for growth. Immigration can indeed be a benefit, but the low-skilled, non Western immigrants that actually arrived have overwhelmingly been a burden.
No serious country should put up with this. That’s why I have now published a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country. That plan is laid out in full below, but here is an executive summary.
The first step is to establish a Public Benefit Test or PBT. Modelled on what Denmark does, the PBT would allow us to evaluate each migrant’s net fiscal contributions over the previous five years (tax contributions minus welfare receipts and social housing costs). In order to pass the PBT, a working age adult will have to show that they have made a net contribution over time.
“But non-citizens” some will say “are already barred from claiming benefits or living in social housing. A PBT would be pointless!”
If only that were so. In practice it happens, and one of the reasons it happens is that as soon as a non-UK national gets so-called Indefinite Leave to Remain, they are just as entitled to benefits as a UK citizen.
No one should be granted Leave to Remain or have their working visa extended without passing the PBT except in the most exceptional circumstances. Proposing to extend the period at which we grant Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years, which is what both the Conservatives and Reform seem to suggest, merely pushes back the problem. Legislation is needed to make it explicitly illegal to give migrants welfare payments without them passing the PBT.
That would prevent future arrivals living at our expense, but steps are needed to take those already living here off our welfare system, remove them from social housing, and in many cases remove them from the country.
Legislation is needed to make it mandatory for every working-age non-UK citizen in receipt of any non-pension benefit to take the PBT, too. Working age non-citizen adults who have been living at public expense should not only lose their welfare payments. Legislation should make failure to pass the PBT grounds for non-EEA nationals to be required to leave the country.
What if countries refuse to take back their nationals? In April, South Sudan refused to accept someone being deported from America. The US government cancelled all visas for everyone from South Sudan. The South Sudanese soon backed down. Britain needs to do the same.
Of course, the biggest barrier to removing migrants will not be foreign governments, but our own judges.
Legislation will need to include so-called Ouster Clauses to limit judicial review, and derogation clauses to allow ministers to disapply the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Ministers will need to repeatedly point out that Denmark, also a signatory to the European Convention, has been able to deport foreigners who fail their PBT.
That will almost certainly not be enough. In order to begin large scale remigration separate legislation will be required to empower the Lord Chancellor to sack judges who defy statutory intent, and to give the Lord Chancellor oversight over judicial appointments. Merely pledging to leave the ECHR, as the Conservatives are gearing up to do, is not enough.
Good luck with getting anybody in parliament to agree to this, our elected representatives are far too cowardly to act in the interests of the British and any integrated minorities that live here. We live in a age of state sanctioned political cowardice. Nice idea though.
I think we have to start further upstream and cut back the State’s supply of money at source; it could not then waste what it doesn’t have. The State has no money of its own. What it cannot raise in direct taxes from the overburdened minority it borrows and prints as stealth liabilities for those same taxpayers. It’s immoral and it should be illegal to squeeze the productive in this way. But it’s not illegal, because unscrupulous politicians effectively invite the majority to vote for this form of dependency / parasitism at each Election.
The overtaxed minority need to make a legal challenge to their continued extortion, although I know of no current political party who would be willing to represent them.