Pledge to cut immigration would make the economy 115bn worse off

From an era of fairy tales and baseless myths, civilization took over and logic and intellectualism became the driving force of society and governance. What we see today is a backward slide once again into celebrated ignorance. It appears as though people are fed up with facts. Maybe facts and science have failed, or probably, advancement in science have made people think less.

It started with Donald Trump in America - how people voted for such a person with so much scandal to his name still baffles me up till this day. And then Brexit. A recurring theme in Brexit and Trump is that politicians appealed only to people's feelings rather reason.

Trump says he is going to make America great again without actually saying how he is going to do it - people are excited, and say 'hey I am going to vote for him'. In Britain, Nigel Farage and his friends walk up the stage and say they are going to spend £350 million from Brexit on NHS - with no facts to back up their claim, people say 'hey, I am going to vote for what these guys are selling'.

Surely, Nigel Farage and his team must have known that the things that they were saying were untrue. But they said it regardless. They knew that a lot of people wanted that and it was easier to win an election by saying what the majority of people want to hear - irrespective of its possibility as well as adverse effect on the greater good of the country.

Now that we have decided to leave the EU, the same Tories are selling us another mantra again. 'We will cut immigration to the tens of thousands'. Whether or not any real thought has been put into this remains to be seen. But it makes sense to a politically minded individual to think that if more people wanted Brexit, surely more people would want less immigrants. 'Sell them fewer immigration numbers then' - It is appearing as though this is what politics today has become.

Even the defence minister, Michael Fallon conceded that the party had not worked out how much achieving this would cost the public finances.

A number of good scientific research has been carried out and evidenced that dropping the net immigration figures to the tens of thousands as the Tories as promising will adversely affect the economy. In a few of our previous articles, we have highlighted and argued that based on our analysis of a research by Global Future, the UK needs at least 200,000 migrants to keep the economy running after Brexit.

The Office for Budget Responsibility also put a statement forward in 2016 on the basis of research and data available to them. That an 80,000 dip in net migration would create a loss of £6bn a year by 2020-21.

The most recent research, carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates reducing net immigration below 100,000 a year would make the economy between 4.1 per cent and 5.7 per cent smaller by 2030. Thereby inflicting a whooping £115bn damage to the economy.

Reiss Edwards immigration solicitors therefore call on the government to ditch this net migration target and highlight the positive contribution made by immigrants to the British economy. We appreciate that immigration should be managed. What we don't appreciate is over managing immigration at the expense of the prosperity of the British people.