Foreigners Are Claiming Benefits! (And Other Things That Happen When They Live and Work Here)
The Times turns data into dog whistles - here's what those numbers actually mean.
This is Bearly Politics - an independent publication about power, policy, and the curious national habit of blaming the nearest immigrant when the Wi-Fi goes down. Today, we’re unpacking this week’s moral panic about benefits from The Times - a headline that’s been gleefully passed around by the usual suspects as proof that Britain is being bankrupted by foreigners.
Shocking news from The Times came out this week - there are 1.9 million (million I say!) “foreign citizens” claiming benefits in the United Kingdom.
“Completely unacceptable” cries a tweed-clad man who is definitely not in Clacton.
“They’re stealing our Universal Credit!” comes the chorus from the freshly rebranded sewer called X.
Now, according to the article in The Times which was passed onto me on this very site by a person who believes in “full citizenship” and that “foreigners” really should not have the same rights as people born here, this revelation is “unsustainable and unfair” and the taxpayer is footing a completely outrageous £10 billion bill.
This bill is for foreigners who have the audacity to need support for paying rent, feeding their children or (god forbid) to retire and claim the state pension1, and to give “legitimacy” it quotes the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, and the head of something called “Centre for Migration Control2.”
However, before everyone goes to knock on their elderly Danish neighbours door and demands that they give back the £176.46 that they got to survive on this week as a basic pension payment, I think we should perhaps all take a breath and look at what’s being said and, rather more importantly exactly what’s being omitted. Because like with all the best moral panics about migrants and money, the maths is fine, but the meaning has, as usual, been mangled beyond any recognition.
Are There Really 1.9 Million “Foreign Citizens” Claiming Benefits?
Technically, yes - but, as ever, context matters here, and it changes the story quite a bit.
The figure quoted comes from two datasets - one from the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions), that shows that 1.26 million foreign nationals are claiming Universal Credit. The other dataset comes from the Labour Force Survey which adds another 623,000 foreign nationals claiming what is classed as “other benefits”.
Combine those two and et voila, you get the terrifying 1.88 million. Get the scandal megaphones!
Except - there are nearly 7.6 million total UC claimants in the UK, so foreign citizens make up roughly 16.6% of that number. When we take into consideration that these feckless foreigners also make up 19% of the workforce it turns out they’re clearly taking the piss.
Oh, no wait - it looks like they’re underrepresented. Whoopsie.
Bearly Factual
Claim: “Migrants are draining the welfare system.”
Reality: Migrants make up approximately 19% of the workforce, but only 16% of UC Claimants - and typically pay more into the system than they take out. Another point to note here is that as of May 2025 nearly 34% of people who are currently claiming Universal Credit are, in fact, already in work because, it turns out, UC has become a wage top up scheme for people whose jobs pay them too little to live on. Migrants are over-represented in low wage work - cleaning, care, logistics, hospitality and food production - all of which are sectors that under pin the UK’s economy. If they are claiming Universal Credit3, it’s not because they’re lazy scroungers, it’s because the system is designed that way.
In addition to this, these “foreign citizens” also includes EU nationals with settled status, refugees and long term residents - many of whom will have lived in the UK for decades, paying National Insurance, VAT on everything they buy, council tax and the various other ways that they contribute to the treasury, and are legally entitled to claim the same support as everyone else.
But £10 Billion Sounds Like An Enormous Cost, Doesn’t It?!
Oh, absolutely, it’s a BIG SCARY NUMBER®, which is exactly why they put it front and centre.
However, when you consider that the total welfare budget for UC in 24/25 was around £87.8 billion, you realise (again) that a spend of £10 billion pounds on these dastardly foreigners worked out to around 11.5% of the total spend - again, underrepresented based on the proportion of people living in the UK who were born abroad.
What’s also worth remembering is that most UC claimants, migrants and “natives” included, pay income tax and national insurance and their contributions offset much of the “cost” that is incurred. It’s been repeatedly found by the Migration Observatory at Oxford that working-age migrants (i.e. the one that everyone is having a fannywobble about) generally contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits and services - which is especially true for those from the EU4.
So yes, £10 billion is indeed a BIG SCARY NUMBER®, but it’s a number that gets completely stripped of context and deliberately divorced from any sort of proportion. That spend isn’t evidence that “foreign citizens” are abusing the system - it’s evidence that people who live and work here - legally - sometimes need the same help that is available to everyone else.
Bearly Factual
Claim: “£10 billion in benefits to foreigners is bankrupting Britain.”
Reality: It’s 11.5% of total UC spending - less than the £16 billion the government wrote off in pandemic fraud.
But Why Are We Even “Giving Benefits” To People Who Aren’t Born Here?
Because, despite what Margaret Thatcher would probably want you to believe, that is exactly the way a functioning society works.
UC is not a national loyalty scheme - it’s a social safety net that’s based on your residency and contribution, not your birthplace. People only become eligible to claim from Universal Credit only after lawful residence, visa conditions and in most cases, many years of paying into the system.
The idea that migrants can simply arrive and start claiming is nonsense, and something that The Times conveniently skips over. The rules are pretty straightforward - to be able to claim UC you:
Must have indefinite leave to remain or have naturalised.
Refugee status
Or be from a category covered by reciprocal agreements (such as the EU settled status).
For many, many migrants that means that there is a minimum continuous period of living here for five years during which most will be working and paying the various taxes that go along with living in this country.
If you have lived in this country for five or ten years and contributed to society, can you really be considered an outsider? Or just a taxpayer who may need help with the rent when life goes wrong?
But don’t migrants come here to live off benefits?
If they were doing that, they’d be absolutely terrible at it.
There are a large number of studies that myth bust this, including from the OBR which in 2024 found that net migration improves public finances while the Oxford Migration Observatory have both previously debunked the idea that Britain’s welfare system acts as some sort of “magnet.”
And when you actually have a look at the welfare system in the UK, you’ll realise that… well… it’s not very good. Especially not when compared to EU countries. Universal Credit is often sanctioned, fully means tested and the amounts that are available barely covers rent in most of the country. There are zero extra perks for migrants and, if anything, even more barriers, because “No Recourse to Public Funds” which is emblazoned on BRPs for most migrants exclude them from any benefit claims, even if they’ve worked and paid taxes for years.
The increase in migration that we’ve seen over the past few years has largely been down to the fact that the UK has jobs to fill5, Universities to subsidise and an ageing population to care for - it most certainly not for benefits that most migrants won’t even be able to claim for a minimum of five years. The same newspapers and politicians who are in a constant wobble about “foreigners on benefits” are also the exact same ones who refused to raise the minimum wage, regulate zero-hour contracts or actually pull their finger and build houses that normal human beings can afford.
They created a dependency on cheap labour and now they resent their labour for being cheap.
So Why Does The Narrative Keep Coming Back?
Quite simply, because it works.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book - when your country is not doing so great, it’s easy to blame the outsider. For especially Chris Philp, it is much simpler to point at a person who was born abroad than to admit in any way or form that austerity hollowed out social care, housing and wages and that Brexit has been an unmitigated fuck up that is having far-reaching effects on both the financial stability of this country and migration levels.
It’s much easier to shout about the unsustainability of looking after “foreigners” than it is to explain to your constituents why there are record numbers of people born in this country who also need help despite the fact they’re working full time.
Very usefully as well is that this rhetoric of “the migrant is taking your things” also feeds into a cultural hierarchy - by dividing the working poor into the “deserving” natives and the “undeserving” foreigners, you make it that much easier to exploit both groups. If you can get a worker in Doncaster to blame a careworker from Bangladesh for his stagnating pay and lack of public services, you’ll never have to explain the impact of corporate tax avoidance or landlord subsidies.
Dutifully in the article that this whole piece is based on, The Times quotes Nigel Farage6 who gravely warns that “things can only get worse” - by which he means, of course, that they can only get worse for him if the truth ever catches up with him7 since his entire career depends on making sure that the public in the UK only ever looks sideways instead of upwards.
Another thread in this story is the “Centre for Migration Control” whose lead The Times rather uncritically relies on to further the message of those menacing foreigners. This body is a tiny pressure group with no real recognised research credibility and is one of several right-leaning outfits that tend to produce reports that are designed to become newspaper headlines rather than academic evidence. Its stated mission on its website reads that it “is a think tank committed to controlling and dramatically reducing migration to Britain” and that it is “committed to controlling and reducing migration to Britain.”
The article doesn’t note or question any of this - presents their spokesperson as being credible, the political rhetoric he imbibes as fact and emotion as economics.
Most of the economic evidence from reliable sources contradict the political narrative - but you’d never know that from The Times article, which gives the distinct impression of investigative revelation while it’s really just a lightly rewritten DWP spreadsheet that’s heavily filtered through Reform UK.
But Chris Philp Says That It’s “Unsustainable and Unfair”!
Yes, he does say that - but what’s really unsustainable is this endless damned cycle of scapegoating.
For fourteen years the Conservative government while in power starved public services, suppressed wages and drove millions of people into precarity - and now one of their previous ministers (along with the media) is choosing to blame migrants.
This results in public anger rising, leading to the same politicians responsible for the actual situation using that anger to justify even harsher immigration policies, which in turn drives up labour shortages which then leads to costs being pushed even higher.
Rinse. Repeat.
At the same time, the people who are screaming loudest about “foreigners on benefits” will happily vote for parties that handed £37 billion to failed COVID contractors, tens of billions of pounds in energy subsidies to fossil fuel giants and billions more in tax cuts to corporations and non-doms.
But a Filipino careworker gets a housing benefit top up? Cue the outrage.
I want to end this FAQ with a bit of perspective, so just for fun, let’s play out what it would look like if the peanut gallery got its wish and every single “foreign citizen” vanished tomorrow.
Because the UK would not suddenly have £10 billion to spend on hospitals, potholes or more benefits for “natives”, it would have an instant staffing crisis8, consider that we would lose:
25% of our Health and Care workforce (made up of 27% of our nurses and 35% of our doctors)
30% of our hospitality workers.
33% of our admin and support services.
23% of our transport and storage services.
19% of our manufacturing workforce.
It’s nonsense to say that the welfare system is being drained by migrants when it’s actually being drained by low pay, unaffordable housing and a decade and a half of what was political cowardice that was sold to us as “tough decisions” and “fiscal responsibility.”
Whenever a newspaper like The Times chooses to frame poverty as a matter of nationality instead of policy, they’re not informing the public, they’re laundering prejudice.
The long and short of it? Yes, there are 1.9 million foreigners claiming benefits in the UK - and you know what that tells us? It tells us they live here, work here and that they also form part of the same fragile, over-stretched economy as everyone else.
That they need support isn’t the scandal - the scandal is that anyone in one of the richest countries on earth still does.
What is one myth about migration that you wish people would stop repeating? And if you could rewrite The Times headline honestly, what would it be?
If you appreciate myth-busting the moral panics that we’re constantly being sold, you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Bearly Politics. Subscribe for free, or consider supporting if you can - I do this in my spare time, without a billionaire sugar daddy (Mr Soros is yet to respond to my please).
If not, a share would be just as welcome.
That they more than likely contributed to for most of their working lives - the monsters!
Which sounds a bit less like a think tank and more like a 1950s government department with a filing cabinet full of eugenics pamphlets.
Which they can only do once they either naturalise or gain Indefinite Leave to Remain status, by the way as “new arrivals” do not have recourse to public funds.
Who made up 9.7% of claimants, while non-EU on ILR made up 2.7% of the claimants in 2025.
Jobs which tend to pay so little that no one who lives here actually wants to do them.
It really does seem that any article about migration needs to have input from Farage - no wonder we are where we are.
Highly unlikely since he’s usually in the States - a land where truth as a concept expired last year November.
When you look at those numbers and consider that the people who had the gall to be born in another country make up only 16% of the UK’s population according to the 2021 census data, you’ll notice that in each of these sectors they are overrepresented.
34% of UC claimants are working. So, 34% of UC claimants are employed by benefit scroungers, many of whom could easily afford to pay actual, living wages. Every UC claimant has to be means tested. Must prove they are poor enough. Why not means test those employers? If they are posting billions in profits, paying their execs 200 times their lowest paid, then they should be forced to pay liveable wages. If those on minimum wage need benefits in order to survive, then that minimum wage is clearly not enough. Am I alone in blaming corporate greed for many of our problems?
I’m so sick of dog whistle politics - especially when it’s increasingly coming from supposed “bastions” of our nation, “The Times” “BBC” plus these days “The Government”. It just shows how morally bankrupt they have become trying to appease their big business paymasters. We need a total reset.