I keep seeing the same claim on Facebook Reels while looking for tool hacks, usually delivered with great confidence and very little curiosity. Immigrants are “on benefits”. A drain. A problem to be solved by sending them “home”. It sounds tidy until you apply even a moment’s thought, at which point it collapses in a heap.
Start with the people being talked about. Many are not newcomers at all but the second generation, born and educated here. Far from idling on the margins, their educational outcomes routinely embarrass the stereotype. Children of Asian and Black immigrants are, on average, more likely to go to university than their White British peers. Indian Britons in particular have degree attainment rates well above the national average. Pakistani and Bangladeshi second generation Britons outperform it too, despite starting from poorer households. Black African Britons tend to do better than Black Caribbean Britons, but both groups bear no resemblance whatsoever to the feckless caricature so lovingly circulated online.
So much for the idea that immigrants and their children are allergic to work or effort. In reality, many are doing exactly what politicians claim to want. Studying. Qualifying. Aiming higher. The awkward footnote is that even when they do everything right, degrees in hand, they often see weaker labour market outcomes than White peers. That is not because they are unqualified. It is because discrimination does not vanish at graduation.
Then there is the other group quietly smuggled into the same accusation. The migrants who really are on benefits while in work. The people doing jobs British workers either cannot or will not do. Care homes. Cleaning. Food processing. Agriculture. Hospital wards at unsocial hours. Low pay, insecure hours, hard graft. When wages are not enough to cover rent, food and heating, the benefits system fills the gap. That is not migrants gaming the system. It is the state subsidising low pay. The same subsidy keeps millions of British workers afloat too, though that detail rarely troubles the shouting.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the rant. The same voices who sneer at migrants “on benefits” also defend the economic model that makes benefits unavoidable. They like cheap labour. They like low prices. They like staffed hospitals and care homes. They just do not like seeing the bill, so they blame the people at the bottom rather than the system that put them there.
And then comes the fantasy fix. Send them home. All of them, apparently. At which point reality stops humouring us. The NHS would collapse, not slowly, not eventually, but almost overnight. Doctors, nurses, porters, cleaners, carers. Entire departments rely on overseas staff. Social care would implode, forcing patients into hospitals that no longer have the staff to treat them. Waiting lists would become a bad joke.
The people who wrap themselves in the NHS one minute and demand mass deportations the next are not being tough or patriotic. They are indulging in magical thinking. Our economy runs on migrant labour, and our low wage model runs on benefits. If you want fewer people on benefits, pay people properly. If you want the NHS to survive, stop pretending it can function without the people who actually keep it going.
Everything else is noise. A story told to avoid admitting that the system being defended only works because someone else is being paid too little to live.
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