How internal / external immigration is viewed by each EU country (Eurobarometer poll)

overwhelming their systems and thus crashing the financial system

What are you on about? Europe has taken way higher levels of immigration and asylum than this without any noticeable economic effect in the past.

Britain was taking three times as many refugees in 2000 as we do in 2016 - 75,000 a year up from 25,000 nowadays.

There have been several economic crises in Europe in the last eight or nine years and precisely none of them has been to do with immigration, or refugees. Unless immigrants compose short-sighted fiscal policy in various member states, bank underregulation and a surfeit of cheap consumer credit that can't be backed up and make the EU reluctant to go towards tighter financial integration or a "two speed Europe".

The fiscal impact of immigration is somewhere around 1% of GDP in the UK and immigration actually helps our economy as our workforce can't replace itself quickly enough to support the post-war baby boom that was a trend in the entire western world.

In fact most European countries, the UK included, there needs to be a minimum level of immigration precisely to stop the aging population draining public funds and to keep debt below 100% of GDP and go further into financial turmoil.

You'll notice a correspondence between the number required for 50% of GDP as debt in 2062 (244,000) and current UK net migration figures (between 200,000 and 250,000) - the government is following the Office for Budget Responsibility's advice.

For some financial perspective, asylum seekers in the UK receive £36/week to live on, plus their accommodation. That means that if all of the ~30,000 asylum seekers we received in 2015 were adults eligible for the grant (they're not) we would be spending £56m a year on them plus upkeep for the housing which local authorities would do anyway.

For some contrast, that's from a welfare budget of £111 billion, meaning that the maximum cost of asylum to the UK in 2015 constituted 0.05% of our welfare bill.

Please hang up and try again, perhaps with an argument that doesn't attempt to hide prejudice behind economics.

/r/dataisbeautiful Thread Parent Link - rferl.org