| kowenicki said: I have a question regarding the amnesty for the 750k to 1m illegal immigrants proposed by the Lib dems. Do they have a scooby doo how much this will cost!? Illegal immigrants cost the state nothing... obviously. Now... if they have an amnesty then they will presumably immeditaely go on to benefits, the employer who is paying to employ an illegal immigrant is doing it because they dont want to pay mimimum wage, NI etc... so that "job" will vanish... indeed the emplyer will be prosecuted, the amnesty isnt for the employer itsd for the illegal immigrant, perhaps some non-illegals working for that husienss will lose their jobs too. So lets play safe here and say 500,000 illegal immigrants If all of them hit the benefit system then thats approximately £50,000,000 per week (very low estimate) in new benefit claims..... £2.6bn per year Not to mention all of these people will now be eligible for free dental care, eye care and health care in general. Where is the capacity? Any comments or ideas? |
You've raised some good points there and I'll have a go at trying to tackle them. Apologies for the long reply but it's a fairly complicated issue (and you've forced me to do some reading)!
I guess just to add to your first point this is very difficcult as no one really has a clue about the number of people who would eventually benefit from this scheme due to lack of definitive numbers of illegal immigrants, not knowing how many of them will qualify (speak english, >10 years ect) and whether spouses/families will be allowed to then come to the country.
It might help to breifly look at the other options to an amnesty to put any costs into perspective. If we try to find and deport the illegal immigrants living in Britain then according to a leading think tank (albeit a centre-left one), IPPR, it will take us 20 years and cost £5Bn (based on 500,000 immigrants) so certainly not a cheap option.
I would disagree with your claim that illegal immigrants cost the state nothing (even if we were to drop any attempts and associated costs with to find and deport them). These immigrants could end up involved in crime and there are the obvious costs involved with that. In fact, if they are here illegally they must rely on either charity or crime (whether it's active crime or illegal employment) in order to survive. Therefore I would argue that there are significant costs involved with the 'do nothing' approach, although admittedly I couldn't guess a figure.
If the amnesty were to go ahead then those eligible would be allowed to work and therefore help to generate wealth and pay taxes contributing to the economy. As you point out this will likely generate a cost for the state upfront but I suppose the idea is that long term it will reduce costs and generate wealth/taxes.
On the point of legal workers losing their job or being denied a job vacancy, there have a number of studies which have shown that this type of amnesty actually increase the labour demand due to factors icluding employers unwilling to pay higher wages for legalised workers and a high demand for irregular work.
It has also been suggested that by reducing the underground economy through an amnesty you will in fact reduce one of the causes of illegal immigration (the underground economy is thought to be a cause rather than effect of illegal immigration). Obviously it's not quite that simple as an amnesty would open up new legal family ties and networks as well as perhaps encourage other family members/friends to come illegally and so potentially could further increase undocumented immigration (as has been found in studies from the US, although there is a lack of data for the EU on the issue).
One of the sources I used which links to others (a good read if you're interested)
http://www.immigrationmatters.co.uk/4321.html
