Will you tell the liberals, or shall I?

Ten years of record immigration to Britain has produced virtually no economic benefits for the country, a parliamentary inquiry has found.

A House of Lords committee, which is due to report next Tuesday, will call into question Government claims that foreign workers add £6 billion each year to the wealth of the nation.

It is expected to say this must be balanced against the increase in population and their use of local services such as health and education, resulting in little benefit per head of the population.

"Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run," the report will say.

The findings of the Lords economics committee threaten to demolish the key argument made by ministers to justify the highest levels of immigration in the country's history.

The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration.

[...]

A Whitehall paper produced for the committee said average output growth over the past five years was 2.7 per cent a year and migration contributed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of this. The Government said this indicated a contribution of £6 billion - or £700,000 a day- from foreign workers.

However, the committee's final report is expected to say the Government should have focused on the impact of immigration on GDP per head, not the economy as a whole.

David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, said in his evidence to the committee that the Government had excluded costs from crime, security, the race relations process, health "tourism" and imported ailments such as TB.

My own objections to mass immigration are, as I have made clear many times before, centred upon the cultural, religious, and (dare I say it?) ethnic change that it brings, and the social problems that will arise in the future as a result of these changes, as well as the essentially undemocratic way in which the political elite has foisted mass immigration upon this country, without ever seeking the consent of the public. Even if there were short-term economic benefits to be had from mass immigration, I would still say that these were outweighed by the long-term social costs. Having said that, economic factors are clearly an important consideration, so I am glad to see that the arguments of those in favour of mass immigration apparently fail on this count as well.