Are we debating immigrants taking jobs or claiming benefits.......I Googled "immigrants on benefits" to many to link, just some of the opinions put forward....
Those from the European Economic Area (EEA - the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) had made a particularly positive contribution in the decade up to 2011, the authors noted, contributing 34% more in taxes than they received in benefits and services.
The story is slightly different for immigrants who came to the UK from outside the EEA in that period. They also put more into the public purse than they took out, but by a smaller margin of 2%.
This is significant because a good proportion of those people who have been in the UK for some time are likely to be older than the most recent immigrants, and so are more likely to be on benefits and using health services than those who have arrived since 2000 (who have an average age of just 26 years).
To make sense of the numbers, it helps to break them down a little - to divide the net contribution to the public purse by the number of people in each group under study.
When we do that, we see that between 1995-2011, on average each EEA immigrant put about £6,000 more into the public purse than they took out.
Non-EEA immigrants each took out about £21,000 more than they put in during that period.
non-EEA immigrants make up two thirds of the UK immigrant population. So both groups of immigrants - EEA and non-EEA - considered together, take out around £14,000 more than they put in, amounting to a deficit of around £95bn for the public purse between 1995-2011
That is, it's been spending more than it's got for some time now. And it's spending a large proportion of that money it doesn't have on, of course, its own people.
And we can see that clearly when we look at how much native Brits are each putting in and taking out of the public purse. On average, each native Briton took out roughly £11,000 more than they put in between 1995-2011.
So to conclude, on average only Europeans are putting in more to the UK public purse than they're taking out. At least that was the case between 1995 and 2011.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25880373Number of foreign nationals on benefits soars to 400,000The number of foreign nationals claiming benefits such as Jobseeker’s Allowance has jumped by 40 per cent in just four years to more than 400,000, new government figures have disclosed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10271855/Number-of-foreign-nationals-on-benefits-soars-to-400000.html.
