Record levels of
immigrants are putting too much strain on British public services and the government has overstated
their positive economic impact, a parliamentary report said on Tuesday.
The inquiry by a House of Lords committee including two former finance ministers concluded that a surge in immigration since the post-2004 expansion of the European Union had led to “little or no impact” on economic well-being.
It called for caps to be set on the number of people allowed to enter Britain, saying some groups - the low-paid, some ethnic minorities and young people looking for their first job - may have suffered due to competition from
immigrants.
Ministers should set an “explicit target range” for immigration and rules to keep within that limit, the report said.
It also suggested cutting the number of partners and other family members allowed to settle in Britain to join a relative already there.
The report rejected the
government’s claim that immigration was necessary to prevent labour shortages as “fundamentally flawed.”
“Looking to the future, if you have got that increase in numbers and you haven’t got any economic benefit from it, you have got to ask yourself is this a wise thing to do?” said inquiry chairman Lord John Wakeham. “That is why we want the government to look at it.”
The government’s decision to use gross domestic product as the main measure of immigration’s economic contribution was “irrelevant and misleading,” the report added.
Instead, it said the yardstick should be income per head of population, or GDP per capita. “In the short term, immigration creates winners and losers in economic terms,” said the document.
Britain has seen a huge wave of immigrants over the last decade, in particular from new EU members such as Poland.