During the leaders debates before the last general election, David Cameron declared that he wanted to make immigration a non-issue and he would go about it by reducing immigration numbers from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands a year. He hasn’t succeeded in the second objective — more than half a million people arrived here in 2010, only 30 per cent of whom were from the EU — and he most certainly hasn’t succeeded in the first. At least if the reaction to today’s revelations about immigrants on benefits is anything to go by.
Chris Grayling, minister for employment, and Damian Green, immigration minister, wrote an article for today’s Telegraph to reveal that 371,000 immigrants were claiming benefits as of last February — it sparked a lively debate (at the time of writing there were 2,494 comments on the paper’s website on the story, the nature of which you can imagine).
As the ministers observed, most of the people claiming benefits were entitled to do so and of 9,000 claimants from outside the EU investigated by officials, just two per cent may be making false claims.
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