Immigrants vs Billionaires

No. It’s comparing two big buckets people argue about: visible spending blamed on immigrants vs the much larger bucket of “money leaking upward” through market power, weak enforcement, and tax leakage. Billionaires are shorthand for that concentrated-power bucket, not the sole mechanism. The sources guide sensible estimates based off national known figures.

Because it’s about who people blame. The harm bucket mostly tracks the kind of economy you get when wealth and power concentrate: pricing power, rent-taking, regulatory capture, aggressive tax structuring. It's about how (and how much) the system that creates billionaires costs you. It's not about mustache-twirling and mega-yachts, but about the cost of being controlled.”.

Consumer detriment is the cost of crappy markets: overcharging, junk fees, low competition, rip-offs that are hard to notice individually. It isn’t “one billionaire’s invoice”. The point is scale: that bucket is enormous compared to what people normally point at when they say “immigrants drain us”.

Yes, deliberately. People compare them in real life all the time (“we can’t afford migrants” / “they’re the problem”), so the page shows the order-of-magnitude mismatch. It’s not a full macro model; it’s a sanity check.

Those exist, but they’re not unique to billionaires. Most jobs and investment come from ordinary firms, public spending, and broad market demand. If you want to credit exclusively wealthy-driven “investment” or innovation, you need a clean, attributable number that doesn’t double-count “the economy functioning”. Philanthropy is attributable; it’s also relatively small. I found almost zero 'innovation' or direct growth contributions in any way linked to very large companies or billionairs.

Because real life saturates. Housing, schools, NHS capacity, capital investment, and planning decisions set limits. The chart uses linear scaling and a reasonable cap for readability; the real curve bends if you don’t build and invest, but the demonstrated relative income is reasonable for this scale.

I've included what I could reasonably claim giving the evidence I could find. There's a LOT more 'extraction' related costs that I didn't include because it was more about exploitative business practices, rather than billionaire-linked activities. Every single way I could find to measure immigrants, they came up 'profitable', but I couldn't find a single way of looking at billionaires that wasn't a loss to the British economy. Think I should add another metric? Let me know.

Totally real. The question is why it’s happening: we underbuild, we undertrain, we bottleneck planning, we hollow out services, and then we blame the newest people for pressures that were baked in. Migration can add demand, but policy decides whether supply follows. Done well, local services expand when more pressure arrives, because those people can fill those roles. There are edge cases where immigrants cost more, but investment in those services often comes because of the pressure becoming more impactful. It's simply not true to equate more people with more problems.

Some do, because life happens, but the “big picture” is mostly working-age people paying tax. Also: the most visible costs are the ones that get headlines (asylum hotels, temporary accommodation), not the steady boring flow of wages, VAT, and payroll taxes and SME engagement/activity.

For most people, the effect is small. Where it bites is narrow: low-paid sectors with weak enforcement and weak bargaining. That’s a labour standards problem: minimum wage enforcement, union power, and stopping exploitation. Kicking out migrants doesn’t fix the broken labour market; it just shrinks the workforce and keeps the same bosses in charge.

Yes, sometimes. Which is exactly why the enemy isn’t the other worker. The fight is: enforce wages, stop dodgy agencies, stop employers undercutting, and raise standards for everyone doing that work. “Blame migrants” is the story that lets your boss keep exploiting you AND the brown fella next to you.

It’s the opposite: it’s trying to drag the argument back to material reality. If your main objection is culture/identity, say that out loud — but don’t pretend the Treasury is collapsing under the cost of immigrants while far larger leaks go unmentioned.

No. It’s about scale and misdirected blame. Immigrants can create pressures; billionaires can donate money. The claim is: if you’re mad about being skint, you’re mostly looking in the wrong direction.

A credible, sourced case that (a) migration is a large net fiscal loss at the scale we’re talking about and (b) the extraction bucket is minor or already well-contained. If those flipped, the chart flips.