Facts about migration in the UK

1. Only 0.24% of the UK Population are refugees.
2. Only 4% of Europe’s asylum seekers are applying to live in the UK which, when figures are compared proportionately to population, ranks the UK 17th in Europe.
3. The UK is the only country in the EU which detains migrants for an indefinite period without sentence. It has the largest immigration estate in Europe.
4. The UK has detained more than 600 children between 2011 and 2015, despite pledging to stop this practice in 2010. The majority of these children were under 12 years old, and have come from asylum seeking families.  In 2013 there was an 80% rise in children in detention compared to 2011. 
5. The private security companies (such as G4S, Serco, GEO and Mitie) which run detention centres in the UK pay those detained as little as £1 an hour to clean and cook: modern day slavery within the UK. In one month over this year at Harmondsworth, one of the UK’s largest detention centres, detainees worked a combined 16737 hours and were paid a collective total of £17,218. 
6. Immigrants, including refugees, pay more into the public purse compared to people born in the UK. Immigrant entrepreneurs set up 1 in 7 companies and create 14% of jobs in the UK.
7. Many migrants and asylum seekers in the UK have to wait long periods of time after applying for citizenship before they get told the results of their application – the Home Office has a vast backlog of cases. This sometimes means that people’s cases get lost, and never resolved. It often means that people have to wait for years at a time, without the legal right to work in the UK.
8. EU migrants from Poland and other A8 countries are 60% less likely to live in social housing than UK citizens.
9. A single asylum seeker gets 50% of the financial support that a British citizen is entitled to on welfare benefits – they often experience periods of total destitution when paper work is processed, for example, once they are granted refugee status, there is a delay before they can apply for council housing or welfare benefits.
10. Over 85% refugees are in neighbouring countries which have the least resources and infrastructure to support them. For example, there are over 1m Syrian refugees in Lebanon and over 2m in Turkey and of the 15m people displaced in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them stay in the African continent.