SIR – I was delighted to read Robin Smith’s letter, on getting the RSPB to help determine immigration numbers (Worcester News, July 31).

We now know the Government’s figures for immigration, which they say is running at 500,000 a year, are nothing more than a guess.

Based on that figure five million foreigners have poured into our country in the last decade.

Currently we have about 2.57 million unemployed, which the media says is costing taxpayers £85 billion in unemployment benefits.

That figure includes Neets – teenagers who are not in education, employment or training.

Then there are those on sickness benefits, that’s another 2,500,000 people, so they’re going to cost taxpayers another £85 billion.

Add to that 590,000 single parents on out-of-work benefits, and upwards of £200 billion of our money is poured into the pockets of those of working age living on benefits.

That equates to some £8,500 in extra taxes on the back of each working person in our country.

Why then are our MPs pouring millions more people into our country?

These people have to be given our jobs under the equality laws, thereby adding to the benefits bill.

And why are our MPs so determined to add to our escalating national debt by allowing up to 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians to come here from January 1, 2014?

Immigration figures don’t include the millions of students who have come here and disappeared into the black economy or the millions who have qualified here and have then been allowed to stay.

Nor do they include the million or more who have entered our country illegally, who probably also work in the black economy, which is now estimated to be worth £80 billion a year – all of it untaxed.

Then there’s the fact that our councils are obliged to find accommodation for anyone who is homeless, which means foreigners percolate to the top of the housing queue at the expense of our own.

Doesn’t that explain why half a million council houses have been given to foreigners in the last decade, while two million Britons languish on council house waiting lists?

That our bankrupt government is paying upwards of £200 billion a year to our people who don’t work, while compelling the employment of foreigners under equal rights law, and is planning to pour millions more foreigners into our grossly overcrowded nation, and is also preferentially housing foreigners instead of our own, shows our MPs live in cloud cuckoo land.

N TAYLOR Worcester