Perhaps because it’s the week before Christmas, the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) latest annual report has attracted little attention.

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On asylum, the MAC are absolutely clear, stating that they ‘expect the net fiscal impact of those entering through asylum and refugee routes to be unambiguously negative’. The academics explain this is because asylum seekers have ‘low employment rates and wages, high rates of economic inactivity’ and because they are able to claim benefits sooner, being exempt from the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule. Further, ‘asylum migrants are also much less likely to have earnings at the higher end of the distribution’. The reality is that asylum seekers are not generally doctors or engineers.

The report also notes that research in other countries shows a ‘sizeable negative lifetime impact’ from asylum seekers, with a detailed, data-led 2024 study from the Netherlands finding that each migrant granted asylum cost the Dutch state around €400,000 over their lifetime. What might it mean if the UK faced similar costs? Last year 108,138 people claimed asylum here. Around half of them were granted asylum at ‘initial decision’, but after appeal we should expect at least two-thirds to have their claim granted, based on previous years. This would mean that just for 2024’s asylum seekers we should expect around 70,000 to have their claim granted, meaning a lifetime cost to British taxpayers of around £25 billion. And that figure doesn’t include the costs of housing them before their claims are granted, nor of any crimes they might commit and any prison sentences they might receive.

The MAC have powerful findings on other visa routes too, noting that ‘the average Partner route applicant… will incur a lifetime fiscal deficit… of around -£109,000’. Meanwhile even those who study here and then stay on graduate visas are not significant contributors, with the report noting that their earnings are much closer to those on dependent and partner visas than skilled workers. This follows on from last week’s MAC report on the fiscal impact of immigration, which found that even within the ‘skilled worker’ route, which is overall financially positive, ’72 per cent of the fiscal gain comes from the top 30 per cent of earners’. {snip}

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All of this on its own would be enough to demolish our migration policy. But the MAC have also found a fatal flaw at the heart of how we model migration. They describe how Britain’s ‘fiscal rules are essentially evaluated over a five-year period’ which ‘implies that almost all migration is fiscally positive’, ‘but basing policy on such an outcome will impose future fiscal costs that will outweigh the short-term gains.’

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