Philippe Legrain

Are immigrants taking our jobs? It is an explosive issue, especially with Britain sinking into recession and unemployment rising. So opponents of immigration will doubtless seize on a new report by Migrationwatch which claims that those dastardly foreigners who have the cheek to look after our granny or pick English strawberries are stealing jobs from British people. Yet Migrationwatch’s claims are flatly contradicted by figures from the Office of National Statistics.

Migrationwatch claims that nearly all the jobs created in the UK since 2001 have gone to immigrants. But figures from the Labour Force Survey show that employment among British-born people actually rose by 378,000 between the second quarter of 2001 and the second quarter of 2008, the dates arbitrarily chosen by Migrationwatch. If one excludes the recent fall in employment due to the financial crisis and instead compares the last three months of 2000 with the last three months of 2007, the number of UK-born people with jobs has risen by just over half a million (520,000).

Migrationwatch also claims that employment among UK-born people has fallen by 230,000 since the second quarter of 2004, when Britain opened its labour market to the Poles and other eastern Europeans joining the EU. But this too is contradicted by ONS figures. These show that the number of British-born people in jobs actually rose by 43,000 between the second quarter of 2004 and the same period of 2008. Excluding the impact of the financial crisis, employment rose by 175,000 between the second quarter of 2004 and the last three months of 2007.

Migrationwatch say that “there has been no progress at all in getting British-born unemployed workers into work” since 2001 and blame immigrants for this. But ONS figures suggest otherwise. They show that the employment rate among British-born people – the proportion of UK-born people of working age in employment – rose sharply in Labour’s first term, from 73.5% in the second quarter of 1997 to 76% in the third quarter of 2000. Since then it has remained roughly steady: it was 75.6% in the second quarter of 2004 when Britain opened up to east European workers and 76% in the last quarter of 2007. In other words, the employment rate stopped improving well before eastern European migrants started arriving in large numbers, and has not worsened since.

The bigger point is this. As even Migrationwatch are forced to concede, there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigrants don’t just take jobs, they also create them, as they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. If Britain threw out its Polish workers, there wouldn’t suddenly be more jobs for British people – just as throwing women out of work wouldn’t provide more jobs for men.

Whatever way you look at it, immigrants are not taking British people’s jobs. On the contrary, they are helping to provide vital public services and keeping small businesses going. Not for the first time, Migrationwatch’s xenophobic prejudice is causing it to twist the truth. Andrew Green should be ashamed of himself.