The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which creates economic forecasts used by the government, has exaggerated the financial benefits of mass migration, a think tank has claimed.
Centre for Migration Control (CMC) researchers accused the body of overestimating the tax contribution of future migrants by £6 billion (€7 billion). Robert Bates, the think tank’s research director, told The European Conservative that “nothing better exemplifies the grim political and economic consensus which has existed around mass migration more than this body.”
The OBR was set up by Conservative Party chancellor George Osborne in 2010 and is highly regarded in the established political sphere. In its forecast produced for the latest Budget announcement, the body said it assumed that “new migrants have the same employment, consumption, and residential patterns as residents, and as such pay similar levels of wider taxation.”
Bates described this assumption as “patently absurd.” He told this publication:
Since 2021, Britain’s recent migrants have overwhelmingly been admitted on low-pay, low-skill health visas, or as students who then take on similarly low productivity positions.
The most cursory glance at the data would have shown this to the OBR. However, that would have required them to reconsider some of their political presuppositions. Something they are clearly incapable of doing.
The European Conservative gave the OBR a chance to respond to this criticism, but it did not respond.
Using data from the Office for National Statistics, the CMC established that the average occupation salary for a resident skilled worker was £37,614 (€43,894) in 2023, compared to the average salary for a skilled migrant worker of £31,431 (€36,686). The Daily Telegraph reports that by projecting this analysis over the OBR’s forecast to 2028-29, the CMC found that expected tax contributions by migrants had been overestimated by £6 billion (€7 billion).
Given this discrepancy, Bates said “it is a mystery how such an opaque and unelected quango was able to become so powerful.”
