(A thread on the Immigration White Paper.)
1 The Government is proposing to make British people poorer, by restricting UK employers’ access to productive workers from elsewhere in Europe:
1 The Government is proposing to make British people poorer, by restricting UK employers’ access to productive workers from elsewhere in Europe:
2. How much poorer will the new immigration policy make us? The economy will be between 0.4 % and 0.9% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2025. Individually, we’ll be between 0.1% and 0.2%
3. The Government wants people to think cutting migration will make the UK economy more productive and mean higher wages for UK workers:
4. Will cutting the flow of EEA workers push up wages for UK workers? The White Paper confirms that the Home Office doesn’t know + has no modelling showing that. It also notes that employers won’t automatically pay more for UK labour. Some may employ more machines instead.
5. As for productivity gains, the Home Office concedes that those will come from…. migrants themselves. (MAC = Migration Advisory Committee)
6. This isn’t a surprise. The Govt is doing this even though its own Migration Advisory Committee found migrants have ‘no or little’ impact on employment of the UK-born workforce. Migration is not a ‘major determinate’ of the wages of UK-born workers.
7. (The MAC found that migration has a “positive impact on productivity”, albeit one that is hard to quantify. The MAC also found “no evidence that migration has had a negative impact on the training of the UK-born workforce”.)
8. If adopted, the policies in the White Paper would give the UK net negative levels of work-related EEA migration for several years. UK policy is literally to *send workers home*.
9. 9. Why? Why deliberately set out to make Britain poorer? Par 6.41 of White Paper gives the game away. This is policy based on perception, not evidence. This is the opposite of leadership.
10, Oh, and this policy will make the social care crisis worse too. NHS England reckins 7% of social care workers are EEA nationals. White Paper would cut the inflow of EEA care workers by more than 90%.
12 This is apparently what Theresa May thinks Britain voted for in the EU referendum in 2016. Even if she’s right (and polling evidence suggests she’s not) then she’s arguing that people who voted for Brexit voted to be poorer.
13 And if that's her position, she and her ministers should say so openly. Claiming that the policies in the Immigration White Paper will somehow make the UK and UK workers better off is not accurate, and not consistent with the Govt's own evidence. / Ends
