THE NUMBER of small boat migrants intercepted crossing the English Channel since the Home Office began publishing figures in 2018 passed 200,000 on Friday.
They will cost the taxpayer as much as £65billion over their lifetimes.
Migration Watch estimates fewer than 8,000 small boat arrivals have been removed, based on removal rate figures from Oxford University. This means at least 192,000 are still in the UK. And note that these are only the recorded arrivals.
The UK Government has repeatedly declined to estimate the lifetime cost to the Exchequer of hosting an asylum seeker. In December 2024, the Institute of Labor Economics in the Netherlands estimated the long-term fiscal impact of an asylum seeker to be roughly negative €400,000 (study available here). At the December 2024 euro to sterling exchange rate, this is roughly negative £332,000. Adjusted for CPI inflation, this is roughly negative £343,000, giving an estimated lifetime net cost of over £65billion. For the same money, the country could instead:
• Build 76 hospitals the size of the Queen Elizabeth II in Birmingham, or
• Build 2 new Crossrail-scale underground rail networks, for Manchester and Birmingham, or
• Repair every pothole in England and Wales three times over.
Despite repeated promises by the Labour government to ‘smash the gangs’, Friday marked a watershed moment as the number of detected migrants illegally crossing the English Channel has surpassed the size of a small city, for example Peterborough.
We at Migration Watch warned that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act would lead to more crossings, not reduce them, and it has. The ‘one in, one out’ deal with France has proven a costly failure as we predicted. There is simply no meaningful deterrent for migrants or the gangs. Indeed, even attempts by the Home Secretary are thwarted by Labour backbenchers at every turn and receive little support from the Prime Minister.
Without deterrence, we are on course to add another 200,000 small boat immigrants to our country, and this time, it won’t take anything like eight years.
