BRITAIN: Mass migration not delivering economic benefits, study finds.
Mass migration has not delivered significant GDP growth per capita for the United Kingdom, but it has increased strain on the country, according to a new study.
While illegal immigration recently hit record highs in the United States, legal immigration poses a significant issue for the U.K., where legal migration levels are more than 25 times the level of illegal levels, according to a report Wednesday from the Centre for Policy Studies, a U.K. think tank and advocacy group.
The percentage of foreign-born people in the U.K. nearly doubled over two decades, with 9% of the population being foreign-born in 2001 to 17% in 2021, which is even higher than the U.S., where 14% of people are foreign-born.
Additionally, the United Kingdom has seen 10 million people move to the U.K. and 6.3 million leave since 2010, resulting in an additional 3.7 million new migrants.
While the study acknowledges that “correlation is not causation,” but states that a “country with more people in it will normally have a higher GDP because there are more workers,” and the increase in migration has coincided with a large decline in GDP per capita growth.
Ayn Rand pointed out 60 years ago that you can have mass immigration or a generous welfare state but you can’t have both — at least not for long.