Britain to place curbs on immigrant benefits

                

Tue, 26 March 2013

London — Britain will crack down on the benefits available to immigrants, Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday.
In a major speech in Ipswich, Conservative leader Cameron said that people coming to Britain could no longer expect “something for nothing” and that access to benefits was “something migrants earn, not an automatic right.”
All three main parties have toughened their stance on immigration as opinion polls suggest that it will be one of voters’ top concerns in the run-up to an election due in 2015.
There are also worries about an upcoming “influx” of immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007.
Cameron said that immigrants will have their jobseekers’ allowance cut off after six months unless they can prove they have a “genuine chance” of finding a job, and that they will only be eligible for
social housing after they have been in the country for two years.

Measures would also be taken to end “health tourism”. This means that non-EU nationals could be asked to prove that they have health insurance before they are treated.
The government is also to target illegal immigration, doubling the fine on companies which employ illegal immigrants to a maximum £20,000 ($30,400).
Net migration into Britain was 2.2 million between 1997 and 2009, said Cameron, “more than twice the population of Birmingham”, the country’s second-largest city.
Just days earlier Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats junior coalition partners, said a 2010 election pledge for an amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been in the country for longer than ten years would not be included in the party’s next manifesto. — dpa