Most migrants in the UK not affected by Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposed changes to the welfare system, according to the Migration Observatory
A new report has called into question the effectiveness of Prime Minister David Cameron's argument that the "emergency break" would lead to a fall in net migration.
A report by Oxford University's Migration Observatory has found that newly arrived migrants are less likely to be claiming welfare benefits, undermining Cameron's assertion that his EU reforms would cause migration to fall because only a small number of families would have been affected.
"A large majority of recent EU migrants are not claiming benefits of any kind. That means that most migrants to the UK would not be affected by proposed changes to the welfare system," said Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory.
Cameron had made reducing net migration to the UK a priority during his renegotiation with fellow European leaders, and argued that decreasing benefits to migrants would reduce the pull factor for potential migrants from the EU.
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But migrants from the European Union, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway (EEA), who have been in the country for less than four years are less likely to be receiving benefits than people who have been in the country for longer, said the Migration Observatory.
That means recent migrants are less likely to have been affected by the "emergency break" on welfare.
In 2015, 19 per cent of these recently arrived migrants reported receiving a state benefit in their own right, a share that falls to 13 per cent if child benefit is excluded.
These figures are significantly lower than the estimate produced by the government last year, which stated that, in March 2013, "between 37 per cent and 45 per cent of the EEA nationals (excluding students) who were resident in the UK having arrived in the preceding four years were in households claiming either an in-work or out of-work benefit or tax credit".
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Given more than half of EEA-born adults who reported receiving tax credits in 2015 were working full-time, and around 90 per cent had dependent children (despite less than half of EEA-born adults overall having children),” the Migration Observatory concluded that the emergency brake will be "concentrated on a small share of families with children – particularly minimum-wage workers with children and those in families without two-full time earners."
The government had also previously been slammed after it was claimed that increasing the minimum wage would lead to a larger pull factor.
But the research from the Migration Observatory cast doubt on that assertion: "Some families with children would stand to lose several thousands in tax-credit income, and would still be considerably worse off even if higher minimum wages increase their incomes over the next few years."
The National Living Wage (NLW), the report said, is expected to affect a larger share of newly arriving EU citizens.
"However, the effect of the NLW on the incentive for EU citizens to come to the UK for work is not clear cut, since it could also reduce the availability of low-wage employment. This would make it harder for EU nationals to find jobs," the report added.