Immigration and the NHS

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association, has defended mass immigration claiming that the NHS would be on its "last legs" without migrant workers.

Porter, whose (no doubt fat) salary isn't revealed on his bio-page, has responded to the revelation that migrants cost the NHS £300 million a year by saying,

 "We were told immigrants are filling up our GP surgeries and hospitals. Well, they are. They’re called doctors. And nurses. And porters, and cleaners, and clinical scientists. And without them, the NHS would be on its knees."

Let's examine this quote; the quote makes a number of implicit claims that vectors to a conclusive "truth". The validity of Porter's conclusive assertion is based on the validity of his implicit claims; let's look at them.

All immigrants in GP's surgeries and hospitals are doctors, nurses, cleaners and cleaners.

1. The NHS is not in crisis.

2. None of the immigrants in GP's surgeries and hospitals are patients.

3. The NHS cannot function without mass-immigration.

Let's examine the first assertion, that the NHS is not in crisis using statistics from 2014.

Waiting times for non-emergency tests and surgeries at worst since 2008 

12.5% of patients waited 18 weeks or more for treatment in November 

83.5% of 'urgent' cancer patients treated within 62 days; the target is 85% 

12.5% of patients waited 18 weeks or more for treatment in November

13 hospitals declared major incidents over high A&E numbers 

Health think-tank The King's Fund has warned the situation is 'now critical'

Now let's consider Porter's second implicit assertion that none of the immigrants in GP surgeries and hospitals are patients.

Isn't it strange then that migrants are, based on information released under the freedom of information act, immigrant costs for the NHS is estimated at £300 million a year?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/568992/Migrants-Britain-s-NHS-cost-300million?_ga=1.36674409.899448840.1435041927

The truth that escapes Dr Porter is that the migrant component of the NHS substantially consists of migrant professionals paid from the public purse servicing migrant patients with treatments paid for from the public purse. What USP does Porter imagine that he is delivering?

And finally Dr Porter's third implicit assertion that he NHS cannot function without mass-immigration.

The NHS was not in crisis in the sixties and seventies before comprehensive EU integration and a reinterpretation of asylum laws under the warlord Tony Blair unrolled a welcome mat to the world, and thus we can assume and some of us can even recollect, that it functioned more efficiently before open borders...furthermore it functioned more efficiently before mass-immigration with many migrant contributors. How could this be? This "could be" because before we had mass-immigration, we had something called an immigration policy. Our immigration policy allowed us to restrict immigration to healthy people of good character, capable of assimilating and making a meaningful economic contribution, which meant that the hospitals and surgeries filled up with migrant professionals whilst the waiting rooms remained mostly full (albeit much less full) of old and unwell British people waiting patiently to receive treatment in a system that they had supported, created and funded all of their working lives.

Dr Porter's claims are based on a false conflation of immigration, admittance into a country of individuals on the basis of fulfillment of a number of sensible criteria, and mass-immigration, the unvetted mass admittance of people to a country on the basis of a quota system. A further fallacy is then deployed by the creation of a false dichotomy; A and B are the same, so if you don't want A you can't have B. This of course is nonsense. As the NHS proves, we can and once did, allow the controlled admittance of useful contributors without an open door policy of mass immigration. Open door immigration is like a hotel booking policy that admits guests who can't pay when it has no vacancies. Dr Porter's pronouncements are clearly based on rather obvious fallacy. Fallacy, of course, is just a polite term for lying.