‘Immigration and Scotland’ Summary points: Scotland’s labour force is much less dependent on migrant workers than most of the rest of the UK. The majority of EU migrants in Scotland are employed in lower skilled jobs. A sample of Scottish employers and industry representatives found that they were ‘emphatic’ that Scotland’s employment needs are not different from the rest of the UK, apart from […]
A comment on Lord Green’s article in Conservative Home on 20 November 2017 about the relevance of an EEA style arrangement for post-Brexit immigration from the EU made no attempt to address the argument. Instead, it contained the following abusive content: “It is perfectly fine and welcome to have rigorous debate about this topic, but […]
Introduction 1. The Government has commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee to weigh the evidence about the costs and benefits of EEA immigration. We believe that the evidence is clear: that while some immigration is beneficial to the UK, uncontrolled free movement from the EU is not. Our arguments are summarised below. The current pattern of EU […]
This week our Chairman Lord Green of Deddington wrote an article for Conservative Home arguing that claims made by businesses that they need continued net inflows of migrants from the EU must be scrutinised by government. The full article is below. Do we really need yet more EU workers? By Lord Green of Deddington As […]
The organisation Global Future argues in a recent report (published on 19th March) that cutting net migration would be ‘catastrophic’ for the British economy. It claims that continued high rates of net migration help keep unemployment low, tackle the UK’s chronically low productivity growth and are essential in helping to address the consequences of an ageing […]
Claims that reaching the immigration target will bring a heavy cost to the Exchequer are simply wrong. They are based on unrealistic assumptions that do not reflect the actual policies envisaged. That is the conclusion of a paper issued by Migration Watch UK today. See here: https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/press-release/492 The claims are based on long term forecasts […]
The triggering of Article 50 last week was a major step towards honouring the referendum result. It will undoubtedly please the 69% of the public who say they want Brexit to go ahead (YouGov poll, March 2017) Yet the mass-migration lobby continues to make unconvincing assertions about the risk of economic damage if free movement […]
A recent Economist article (‘Keep Out: Lower immigration could be the biggest economic cost of Brexit’, 25th February 2017) makes a number of bogus claims about both the impact of immigration and the public’s response to it that deserve to be soundly rebutted. The article starts by suggesting that net migration into the UK is […]
Following the publication of a Migration Watch UK paper detailing the implications of Single Market membership for levels of net migration from the EU, a blog post was published on the TUC run Touchstone blog (see here). The main thrust of our paper (which you can read here) was that Single Market membership, which would […]
A new paper published by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) claims that reducing migration to the UK would result in slower growth for the UK economy with a key driver being the impact lower migration would have on productivity. However, given that prospective post-Brexit restrictions on migration would likely restrict the […]