Thread: Eastern European migrants 'add £5bn' to Britain's GDP

Quite a few times, we had some "immigration" debates on here. Anyway..

BBC News - Eastern European migrants 'add £5bn' to Britain's GDP

actually:

The report says countries which imposed restrictions on eastern workers saw growth reduced because of this.

That's 0.4% of the British economy. As Eastern Europeans make up for around 1, 1.5% of the population, this represents a decrease in GDP per capita...

I may be misunderstanding something here, but as I read the article, there is still an overall GDP increase in those countries without restrictions on immigration as opposed to those that had them in place showing an actual decline. I think it's quite obvious that the average immigration worker from eastern Europe is not going to earn as much as the average native.

I don't see why the GDP per capita is more important as the overall GDP in this.

I also suspect that quite a bit of that will be drained out of the UK economy; there are plenty of cases where migrants from eastern Europe come to the UK to seek work, and send a large chunk of the money back to their families in their native land. This regularly happened (and might well still happen) at a business near where I live.

The point is you can't say that increased GDP is positive, which seems to be what you were trying to say. If not, what's this thread for? Countries are not objective entities; if two similar countries join together, does the resultant doubling of GDP mean that the country is now twice as good? Of course not, nothing has changed except some lines on a map; the population is just as well or badly off as they always were. The objective measure of wealth is obviously GDP per capita. 5bn pounds clearly does not spread over 1 million immigrants (£5000 being well below minimum wage), so what your figures show is a decrease in the wealth of citizens.

Hm, I see, you are correct. I seem to have not thought this one through really.. there are of course still suddenly a lot more people in the country.

And worth noting that the increased population also requires a larger investment in infrastructure, which is going to be paid for by the more wealthy citizens. So not only does the average wealth decline, but existing citizens get poorer by having to foot the bill for the costs of immigration.