How many immigrants would satisfy the OBR?

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) Britain must bring millions more immigrants into the UK to sustain our ageing population.

As the Telegraph reports it, the OBR study has found:

‘…. that allowing more than 140,000 immigrants into Britain a year, equivalent to 6million people, would help increase the overall number of people who are in work and improve public finances.’

The trouble with the OBR – like so many official and unofficial bodies – is that it views immigration solely as an issue of economics. And this despite the fact that the leaders of both the Conservative and Labour parties have conceded that immigration on the scale of recent years was not only wrong but is societally unsustainable.

But even more striking is the OBR’s claim that mass immigration is necessary to sustain an ageing population. To sustain this belief you must either believe that this whole new generation of immigrants is going to come to Britain, work here and then return to their countries of origin. Or the OBR has overlooked the fate of all mankind.

For if these new immigrants do indeed come and stay then they will – sad to say – grow old like the rest of us. Which means that in the following decade we will need even more people to prop up the increasingly ageing population that we imported during the previous one. And so on and so on. Perhaps the OBR could tell us how many people they envisage eventually coming into this country?