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| - By: Arron Williams
June 29 2024
The £1600 figure comes from the basic income pilot for care leavers scheme, which is focused on children and is not a plan to pay illegal immigrants.
Context
In an X (formerly Twitter) post by Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies, he claims that "Labour want to pay illegal immigrants £1,600 a month."
While this claim is circulating in the context of the U.K. general election on July 4, Davies also shared this same claim in 2023, stating, "While Conservatives are bringing in tough measures to secure our borders, Labour want to pay illegal immigrants £1,600 a month."
In April 2023, GB News also featured two segments where the claim that young migrants or asylum seekers would be paid £1600 was repeated. One of these segments featured Nigel Farage.
However, the claim is false.
In fact
The figure of £1600 actually comes from Welsh Labour's basic income pilot for care leavers scheme. This scheme focused specifically on young people leaving the Welsh care system and paid them a basic income of £1600 to increase their outcomes. Care leavers – defined as "any adult who has spent time in care" – have much poorer outcomes compared to the rest of society. It is not a scheme that would pay illegal immigrants £1600.
The pilot was launched in July 2022, and the first payments to those eligible for the scheme were made in August 2022. The scheme's evaluation is now in its second year. A total of 635 participants were enrolled. Young people were eligible to enroll if they had been "looked after by one of the 22 local authorities in Wales for a period of at least 13 weeks beginning after their fourteenth birthday and ending after they reached the age of 16 years." They must also be either a resident in Wales or supported as a care leaver by the social services of the Welsh local authority and be living elsewhere.
Davies appears to have extrapolated the figure due to the small number of asylum seekers who have participated in the scheme. The Welsh government states that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are eligible for the scheme, saying, "In line with the Welsh Government's Nation of Sanctuary approach, eligible asylum seekers and refugees are to be permitted to participate in the scheme, so long as they meet the general eligibility criteria and have access to a bank/building society/credit union account." In the pilot scheme, 67 of the 635 participants enrolled were unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. However, they only made up a small percentage of the total participants, and this alone does not suggest that Welsh Labour wants to "give £1600 to illegal immigrants."
The United Nations defines unaccompanied asylum-seeking children as young non-adults who are "separated from both parents and are not being cared for by an adult who by law or custom has the responsibility to do so." Asylum seekers are people who have left their country and are seeking protection from persecution and human rights violations in another country. They haven't yet been legally recognized as refugees and are awaiting a decision on their asylum claim.
The fact that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children took part in the scheme is what these claims have latched onto to suggest Labour wants to give £1600 a month to illegal immigrants. However, the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children who took part in the scheme are not illegal immigrants.
The verdict
Welsh Labour is not planning on paying illegal immigrants £1600 a month; the figure comes from the temporary Basic Income for Care Leavers trial, which included some asylum seeker children. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.
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