“Britain is home to the greatest workforce in Europe. The Poles,” runs a favourite joke of comedian Jimmy Carr. But while immigration might make a good punchline, for many businesses the economic implications of who moves where have a clear effect on the bottom line.
Britain has a record of welcoming immigrants, from M&S co-founder Michael Marks – who arrived from Russia in the 1880s – to the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who fled Uganda in 1974. And there are more of them than ever before: the number of foreign-born people of working age in the UK increased from 2.9 million in 1993 to a little under six million in 2011. Employees born outside the UK account for more than 9 per cent of the workforce, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Conversely, in November 2012, the Office for National Statistics said the rate of net migration (the number of arrivals minus those leaving) had fallen to the lowest level since 2004, with just 183,000 newcomers, despite economists predicting an influx of jobseekers from Italy, Spain and Greece.
Should a fall in immigration be cheered? “Migration is important in shaping a country’s wealth and future,” says Mark Beatson, the CIPD’s chief economist. “If the US hadn’t had waves of migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it wouldn’t have got anywhere near as rich so quickly. Migration will also be one of the ways countries deal with an ageing population.”
Immigrants are generally young, and have more children – good news for the economy. But, Beatson says, there are different types: those who complement the local workforce, generally at the higher end of the jobs market, and those who “push wages down” by substituting for domestic labour.
Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via Immigration: “They come over here, they take our jobs…” – People Management Magazine Online.
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