Monday, May 04, 2009

Department Of Made Up Statistics.

According to the Daily Express each illegal immigrant is to cost £1 million. Now there are an estimated 800000 illegal immigrants in the UK so according to "The World's Greatest Newspaper", they should be costing us £800 000 000 000 . £800 Billion is a lot of money.

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing they haven't entirely thought through the number they made up.

8 comments:

JuliaM said...

Probably a guest article written by someone from the Treasury, then...?

Mark Wadsworth said...

That's a tip-top made up statistic! Well spotted. Meanwhile, the Graun etc are probably reporting that each immigrant brings net benefits to the UK economy of £10,000 per year.

alison said...

LOL Mark, yup.

Tim Worstall said...

The actual stat is that......someone who works on minimum wage, marries and has two kids, will, over their lifetime, cost the taxpayer 1 million to pay for tax credits, school, pensions, NHS etc etc etc minus the tax they will pay on their wages.

I think the number's about right actually. But the important point to note is that it's not really about immigrants or asylum seekers. It applies to hte home grown chavs as well....

Sue said...

The figure come from here:

Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Could Cost Taxpayers 'Up to £1m' Per Family.

Ross said...

Right, I see, some immigrant families could cost £1 million over a lifetime.

That's still very different from the Express's front page headline that "EACH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO COST US £1MILLION". Which is plainly untrue as the data doesn't refer to individuals or claim that it will apply universally.

mexicano said...

The figure could even be too low. How much crime do they cause and what is the cost to the Brits of preventing / fighting that crime? Many, many billions in security companies, insurance premiums, prisons .... Then there´s the cost every time one of them attempts a terrorist attack, like those on Heathrow and Glasgow airports, for example. Again, the knock-on effect is probably in the billions. Lost tourism? Lost business investment? It all adds up.

Ross said...

How much crime do they cause and what is the cost to the Brits of preventing / fighting that crime? "I don't know, immigration certainly raises the crime levels, but you can't make an estimate of the total cost by just considering all the hypothetical downsides and ignoring all the hypotheitical positives.