One year of spousal chain migration is projected to cost the British taxpayer £5.6 billion during their lifetimes, a government watchdog has admitted.
A report from the independent Migration Advisory Committee this week has revealed that the 51,000 foreigners who were brought to the UK between 2022-23 as a spouse of either a British citizen or permanent resident will come with a “net fiscal cost” of £109,000 by the end of their lives.
This means that partner chain migration for that year alone will cumulatively cost the taxpayer £5,559,000 by the end of their lives.
In contrast, UK residents of around the same age as those who typically enter the country on spousal visas represent a net positive £110,000 to the treasury during their lives.
The MAC said that on average partner visa migrants contribute around £8,600 in taxes during their first year in the country. Meanwhile, the average British resident of the same age contributes around £18,500 per year.
Although such migrants are said to initially be net positives to the economy, they become an economic drain as they age, given their increased use of the National Health Service (NHS).
They also gain access to Britain’s generous welfare benefits system after receiving Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) status, which is typically afforded to migrant spouses after five years in the country, further exacerbating their drag on the economy.
The watchdog report explained that the large disparity between spousal migrants and British residents was likely a result of the progressive tax system, in which high earners pay a disproportionate amount into the nation’s coffers.
Since there are relatively few high earners who come to the UK as spouses, the cohort cannot offset the fiscal drain of the much larger cohort of low earning spouses as is done for British residents.
The Migration Advisory Committee said that they “do not consider a negative lifetime fiscal impact for Partner applicants to be surprising” given that the visa route was “not established for economic reasons”.
Although the report did not provide a fiscal breakdown of all types of migrants, the MAC said that based off the data from the spousal scheme, they predict that cohorts of migrants entering through global talent, start up, or innovator routes will likely be net contributors, while predicting that “refugee and humanitarian routes will impose a significant negative lifetime fiscal cost.”
To mitigate the exploding cost of migration, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has called for the Indefinite Leave to Remain status to be abolished before the millions of so-called Boriswave migrants become eligible. In addition to enabling migrants access to welfare, the status also often confers the ability of migrants to bring their spouses to the country.
The Brexit boss has suggested replacing it with a five-year work visa system akin to that in the United States and to limit access to welfare benefits to British citizens. This, Farage argued, would result in hundreds of thousands of “burdensome” migrants leaving the country.
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