MigrationWatch is twisting the truth

[T_i_B]

One for when you come across an anti-immigrant bore blathering on.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/16/immigration-uk-jobs-andrew-green

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 the independent thinktank MigrationWatch UK, which claims that those dastardly foreigners who have the cheek to look after your granny or pick English strawberries are stealing jobs from British people. Yet the claims of Sir Andrew Green's thinktank are flatly contradicted by figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

MigrationWatch claims that nearly all the jobs created in the UK since 2001 have gone to immigrants. But figures from the labour force survey (xls), 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 says that "there has been no progress at all in getting British-born unemployed workers into work" since 2001, and blames 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.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Thanks for this!

[nxylas]

2. "Independent thinktank" my arse

This "report" clearly shows that when the figures don't support their conclusions, they just make up new ones. Very independent!