France is pushing the UK to crack down on illegal work in a bid to reduce Channel crossings.
The UK and France this week confirmed a returns agreement, in which those arriving on small boats would be sent back to France, in exchange for the UK making a safe route for asylum seekers in France who have not attempted to cross the Channel.
Small boat arrivals have reached their highest ever level for the first six months of the year, and are set to soar as the summer progresses.
Those close to negotiations said that France wants the UK to reduce its attractiveness to asylum seekers, pointing particularly to the British labour market and the lack of national ID cards. French president Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that it was too easy for migrants to find work illegally in the UK.
France argues that the lack of ID cards, and what it says as underground work opportunities, is drawing people to cross the Channel in small boats.
But is the UK’s illegal work economy actually any worse than its European counterparts?
The number of asylum seekers working in the UK illegally is not known, because it is, by its nature, undocumented.
However, different studies help build up a picture of the UK’s clandestine migrant economy.
The most recent estimates of the UK’s unauthorised migrant population are from 2017, when the Pew Research centre estimated that at the end of 2017 there were between 800,000 and 1.2m people living in the UK without a valid residence permit.
This equates to between 1.2 and 1.8 per cent of the UK’s population.
The report estimated that most of this population was likely to be made up of visa overstayers and asylum seekers who had not left the UK after their claims have been refused, but it wasn’t clear how many were working.
The World Bank estimates that the UK has a smaller informal work economy than France, Germany or Italy.
The Bank uses two models to analyse data from 2020 – the latest release available – and estimate the informal economic output of each country as a percentage of their official GDP.
While there aren’t specific records on illegal asylum seeker work, the models look at people who are self-employed, without a pension, or in otherwise informal employment.
A group of people thought to be asylum seekers wade into the to board an approaching small boat at Gravelines, France, in an attempt to reach the UK by crossing the English Channel (Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire)In the first model, the UK scored 11.7 per cent, compared with 14 per cent in France, 14.8 per cent in Germany and 26.1 per cent in Italy.
In the second model, the UK was estimated to make 12.8 per cent of its GDP through formal output, compared with 15.4 for France, 15.6 per cent for Germany and 29.8 per cent for Italy.
UK already stringent on illegal work
Dr Peter Walsh, of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said that the UK already has lower levels of unregulated work than France.
“The French argument is that our perceived liberal labor market regulations and lack of ID cards attract migrants. However, there’s little evidence of how a lack of an ID card system acts as a draw to migrants,” he said.
“As in France, British employers are obligated by law to check that the prospective employee has the right to work. In the UK, British employers can be fined or imprisoned up to five years, which is the same in France, if they are found to have hired someone without permission to work and they didn’t check their immigration.
“Scrupulous legal employers do that already. You of course have unscrupulous employers everywhere, but they exist in France, as they do in the UK.”
Asylum seeker work restricted in the UK
Asylum seekers generally cannot work in the UK while waiting for their claims to be processed.
In the UK, asylum seekers can only work after they have been waiting on their claim for more than a year, and can only take up jobs in very limited number of fields.
Because of these limitations, the majority of asylum seekers cannot work and rely on state support.
There are no published figures on how many asylum seekers have been granted the right to work in the UK.
This is more restrictive than
France, where asylum seekers can apply to work after six months, Germany, where asylum seekers may be able to work after three months, and Italy, where asylum seekers can seek employment 60 days after submitting their application. A migrant dinghy pictured as it prepared to sail into the English Channel from Gravelines, France. (Photo: Carl Court/Getty)MPs from across the political spectrum have previously supported widening the rules on asylum seeker work to avoid them being pushed into illegal employment, reduce the burden of state support and bring in more tax revenue.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) found that allowing all asylum seekers in the UK to work could save the Government a total of £6.7bn each year, increase tax revenue by £1.3bn each year and add £1.6bn to the UK’s annual GDP.
Allowing asylum seekers who have been waiting six months for their claim, rather than straight away, could lead to economic gains of £4.4bn each year, a tax revenue increase of £880m and additions of £1bn to GDP, the analysis found.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How many migrants are estimated to work illegally in UK – compared with Europe )
Also on site :
- Heartbreaking letters Camp Mystic children wrote to their family arrive days after they died in Texas floods
- Watch- Shubman Gill reacts as Ravindra Jadeja teases him in front of Sara Tendulkar
- Nine things over 60s should do each week to stay young (including kitchen dancing)