Blogs

In a series of some 50 tweets Mr Portes (of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research) is claiming that the Migrationwatch estimate that 150,000 Eastern European employees can be paying no more than about £1 a week in net direct taxes cannot be substantiated, and implying that it

Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: 
”Quarterly statistics fluctuate but these figures show an increase of 28,000 Romanians and Bulgarians in employment compared to the same period last year. Most of this has occurred when transitional controls were still in place making it likely that there

Introduction 1.1 There have always been episodes of migration to Britain but, as this paper demonstrates, those episodes were small and demographically insignificant until the Second World War. A study of official census records from 1851 until the present shows that the number of people born abroad living in Britain

In 2012 the Home Secretary announced her plans to tighten some aspects of the student visa system, mainly below graduate level. The Australian, American and Canadian governments have also recently reviewed their student regimes. This note compares the outcomes and demonstrates that the UK is internationally competitive.

The Guardian recently posted an article in their ‘DataBlog’ section which claimed to examine the facts behind our headline claim that 150,000 eastern European migrants pay no more than £1 a week in direct tax.  It is disappointing that despite writing under the tagline “Facts are sacred” the author, Tom

In a Today Programme interview on 30 April about our paper published that day (see Briefing Paper 1.38), Mr Portes did not challenge our findings that low paid migrants pay little or no net direct tax.   However, he suggested that we had overlooked the effect of other taxes paid by the