Although there are many things I find interesting to research, I believe tackling asylum and refugee charities is something of a national emergency. They have given us de facto open borders! Thus I am spending more and more time focussing on this area (which I also find very interesting).
So far I have calculated £304,873,379 spent on 34 asylum and migration charities (across five last available tax years), but the final figure could get much higher considering that there are over 170,000 charities on the Charity Commission for England and Wales alone. It’s an insane number.
Today I thought I’d give you an insight into what researching this area looks like. Normally I discover new charities when I am researching a charity and it lists partner organisations/ promotes another charity on social media. They are often very symbiotic in nature. Take the charity “Migrant Action” in Leeds, which has created this sprawling map of its partners and collaborators:
However, you can also simply go to the Charity Commission for England and Wales and search for charities. If I search for “refugee”, it yields 1,764 matches:
At a glance, you can’t tell which charities have had taxpayer funding, so there’s a bit of trial and error involved. I tend to click on charities whose income is anything from hundreds of thousands to millions of pounds, as big figures sometimes indicate a charity has had taxpayer funding:
For instance, today I tried Refugee Support Group (below),
