Paying Their Way
The fiscal contribution of immigrants in the UK

Author: Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Laurence Cooley and Howard Reed
Contributors:
Price: Free
Publication Date: 27 April 2005

In recent years the issue of immigration has risen rapidly up the public agenda. Some 61 per cent of the population now believe that there are too many immigrants living in Britain.

Yet much of the public’s concern about immigration seems to be based on an exaggeration of the scale of immigration and a belief that immigrants are a drain on the public purse.

This paper seeks to fill a gap in the public understanding of the actual impact of immigration on public finances, by estimating the scale of, and changes in, the contributions made by immigrants to government revenue and expenditure.

The remarkable findings in this paper show that
understanding the fiscal impact of migration is a crucial part of the wider challenge of understanding the dynamics of migration.