A paper just issued by the Migration Matters Trust claims: “Shocking new figures reveal that cutting net migration to less than 100,000 per year could hammer British jobs.”
The ‘research’ content comprises two graphs of net migration plotted against the UK unemployment and UK employment rates respectively. These show that over the past ten years, net migration has tended to be higher when unemployment was low and lower when unemployment was high.
Movements in these indicators are negatively correlated but if there is cause and effect Migration Matters Trust are mistaken about its direction. It is obvious that high unemployment may well cause a fall in net migration because there will be fewer job opportunities for potential migrant workers. In contrast, Migration Matters Trust completely fail to offer any explanation of how lower net migration can cause existing UK workers to become unemployed and they overlook the evident absurdity that their ‘extrapolation’ implies that if net migration is reduced by one, five British workers will lose their jobs.
Commenting, Alp Mehmet, Vice Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: “Bogus arguments of this kind are deeply misleading and irresponsible.”