Recent immigrants to the UK have paid £25 billion more in tax over the past decade than they have received in benefits, making them more valuable to the economy than native Britons, a study has found.
The study, by experts at University College London (UCL), examined the fiscal effects of immigration between 1995 and 2011, although it draws a distinction between traditional migration from Commonwealth countries and more recent migration, since 2000, from countries in the European Economic Area (EEA).
The authors of the report, Professor Christian Dustmann and Dr Tommaso Frattini from UCL’s Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, said that the contribution of recent immigrants has been “consistently positive and remarkably strong”.
Immigrants from the EEA (the EU states plus Norway, Iceland