Immigrants and the NHS

The Daily Mail reports that the increasing number of immigrants is straining the resources of the National Health Service. The focus is particularly on Eastern Europeans, of whom 579,000 have come to this country since 2004:

A spokesman for the Royal Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said: "We have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of Eastern Europeans accessing services, and it does raise a question about finance.

"These women are extremely vulnerable. They are extremely dependent on out-of-hours clinics, and there has been a significant reduction in these because of the financial-problems in the NHS."

The NHS as a whole does not collect figures on the country of origin of those who use the NHS. The vast majority of surgeries have no information either.

But GPs in Luton say one in four women asking for an abortion is Eastern European. Dr Nina Pearson from the Lea Vale Medical Group, which runs four GP practices in the town, said that in one of their surgeries 400 patients register a month - and 80 per cent of them are Eastern European.

Maternity care is 'an area of work that we are struggling to keep up with at the moment'.

At the same time, Dhimmi Watch reports that the Muslim birth rate across Western Europe is three times that of the native population. I doubt many of them are going private. Pakistanis in Britain also account for 33% of all children with birth defects, as a result of the extraordinarily high number of them (at least 55%) who marry their cousins. That must surely impose a considerable strain on the NHS, especially in places like Bradford, which have considerable Pakistani populations.

But don't worry. Immigration benefits the economy. It must do - surely those liberals can't all be wrong?