People make two big assumptions about immigration in my experience

1) They think the system should be extremely simple 2) They assume everyone involved is being honest

When the reality is

1) Many people involved are lying to claim immigration benefits they have no right to 2) The system needs to have a level of complexity and difficulty to prevent these people from accessing these benefits

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motbus3 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't doubt you Stevie, but I wonder if you could share any sources, proofs of data regarding your remark #1 about people lying.

I believe it is happens and I assume there might be a number of drivers for it, but I wonder how big of a problem is it in reality and how much has it been abused.

For example, friends told me the scheme in the UK might be too prone for fraud on the other hand most of the anti immigration topics do not seem to ask it to be fixed but rather stopped. What is your opinion on that? Do you think immigration is a big source of corruption problem? And how big is it relative to other problems?

My question comes from a point that I question if this is a populist/nationalist act to create a common enemy, literally the Enemy from 1984, rather than actually addressing the root cause of the problems. I am referring to the UK mostly because I have many friends living and working in the UK and some are British and some others are not.

And it seems weird to me that tackling such issues ( eg of the asylum seekers and the illegal immigration) as root causes of the current economic situation. Is it going after those folks really make a change on the prospects of the economy or is it addressing emotional needs to feel that someone is in control and that someone will take care of you because they fight the "enemy"?

For example, one of my British folks pointed out, and I did not validate myself, that the cost per asylum seeker is of £40 a week and there about 110.000 people in that situation which would make an expenditure of 4M per week or 200M per year. Which seems quite a large amount of money to deal with humanitarian assistance. And it would represent about 10% of the total expenditure. Another friend pointes out that UK collects £2.7B in taxes considering Health care, skilled and senior staff workers. The deficit in the public accountants are rather debatable so I do not have an opinion. What do you make from it?

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ashray 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's well known that people often lie on visa applications and try to immigrate illegally. The US publishes a yearly review of overstayers broken down by country of origin. So you can see where the highest problem areas are. Sometimes this is masked because of way stricter visa issuance policies. So for example, you may not see a super high overstay percentage for India because many folks get rejected at the visa application stage. But still, this gives you a clearer picture of how rampant the lying is and the subsequent "disappearing" in the US.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-08/25_0826_cbp_...

I can't address your other concerns about economic impact etc. I'm not sure if there is a negative economic impact from this.

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motbus3 a day ago | parent [-]

That is an interesting document. I did not know about it. I will say that the absolute numbers are higher than I expect, but the relative numbers are around the ballpark of 1%. And depending what is counted maybe ~2% which seems to me that the problem itself is not as big as it seems to me people are making it to appear. It does not seem to be foreigners are trying to overtake or abuse the country systematically as the it has been said by some. Is my reading of the situation same as yours?

	▲	ashray a day ago \| parent [-]
		So for Visa Waiver countries one of the requirements is to keep that number under 1% or so to stay in the visa waiver program. For visa required countries, if the visa vetting process wasn't so strict, probably the numbers would be a lot higher.

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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