I think there are some major problems with the way you interpret the data on fiscal contributions. The problem is that simply talking about immigrants from country X whole cloth, where a substantial proportion of that group are asylum seekers, is almost meaningless because both what we would expect the contributions of asylees and and economic migrants to be are not the same, nor are they the same in actual fact.
To make this a little clearer, take for instance the report you link to on the Netherlands, which was circulated with much fanfare in certain sections of twitter. Much attention was given to the headline finding that immigrants from various African and Asian countries was a net fiscal drain. However, what was missed, and what I think you miss here when describing certain nationalities as overall recipients of monies, is that when focusing on economic migrants the outcomes are much different. In fact, in the Dutch study 'labour' migrants from Africa overall turned out to be pretty much a wash fiscally, with the numbers being dragged down by students and asylees, and the same is true of Turkish migrants. I struggle to see, then, how it implies the need to reduce labour migration - surely only restricting study migration etc. could yield appreciable fiscal benefit.
Secondly, static fiscal analyses such as the ones cited here miss the potential fiscal benefits of complementary task specialisation, i.e. during an influx of lower skilled labour natives reallocate themselves to complementary roles which are more productive or require a different skill mix than immigrants possess, usually moving from manual to communicative roles. Thus, if immigration encourages native upskilling to roles with less migrant competition there could we be considerable fiscal benefit not directly attributable to the migrants themselves. I don't think this element has yet seen much research, but the fact of complementary task specialisation seems to be fairly well established in the literature.
There is more information on the cost of immigration in this article on my own, British Patriot, substack blog: https://britishpatriot.substack.com/p/immigration-the-good-the-bad-and
Do come and have a look!
I think there are some major problems with the way you interpret the data on fiscal contributions. The problem is that simply talking about immigrants from country X whole cloth, where a substantial proportion of that group are asylum seekers, is almost meaningless because both what we would expect the contributions of asylees and and economic migrants to be are not the same, nor are they the same in actual fact.
To make this a little clearer, take for instance the report you link to on the Netherlands, which was circulated with much fanfare in certain sections of twitter. Much attention was given to the headline finding that immigrants from various African and Asian countries was a net fiscal drain. However, what was missed, and what I think you miss here when describing certain nationalities as overall recipients of monies, is that when focusing on economic migrants the outcomes are much different. In fact, in the Dutch study 'labour' migrants from Africa overall turned out to be pretty much a wash fiscally, with the numbers being dragged down by students and asylees, and the same is true of Turkish migrants. I struggle to see, then, how it implies the need to reduce labour migration - surely only restricting study migration etc. could yield appreciable fiscal benefit.
Secondly, static fiscal analyses such as the ones cited here miss the potential fiscal benefits of complementary task specialisation, i.e. during an influx of lower skilled labour natives reallocate themselves to complementary roles which are more productive or require a different skill mix than immigrants possess, usually moving from manual to communicative roles. Thus, if immigration encourages native upskilling to roles with less migrant competition there could we be considerable fiscal benefit not directly attributable to the migrants themselves. I don't think this element has yet seen much research, but the fact of complementary task specialisation seems to be fairly well established in the literature.
This is excellent.