Migration and jobs

‘Migrants Rob Young Britons of Jobs’, read the Daily Express’ front page headline on August 19 last year.

Like rape and murder, robbery is an indictable-only offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, so one would hope the Express had some good evidence for this claim. As it turns out, the piece was based on a hopelessly flawed report by Migrationwatch (see article here).

In an editorial about the ‘migrant robbery’ article, the Express argued that “the match-up between areas of high immigration and areas of high youth unemployment will hardly come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of common sense.”

Peter 'Mentally' Hill, then editor of the Express

An immigration/unemployment link might seem like common sense, at least to Express readers, but the point of academic study is to figure out which items of common sense are true, and which aren’t.

In 2006, Simonetta Longhi and colleagues produced a serious piece of scholarship on the issue. They analysed a range of academic studies which had tried to calculate the effect of migration on employment, and found “the ‘consensus estimate’ of the decline in native-born employment following a 1 percent increase in the number of immigrants is a mere 0.024”.

A classic jazz album by three American expats in Paris.
Or, by some job-robbing migrants, if you're the Express

It seems that for every thousand immigrants, only 24 native jobs are lost.This may seem incredibly low, but it does make sense; though immigrants do take jobs, they also create jobs by spending money.

The number of jobs is determined by the demand for things. If the overall demand in the economy goes up by £100,000, this should in theory create £100,000 worth of jobs, because people need to be employed to make the extra things people are buying.

This is what people are buying these days.

So, if an immigrant takes a job worth £15,000, and then spends £15,000, they’ve created as much employment as they’ve taken, at least in theory. It’s obviously more complex in reality, but that’s the basic mechanism by which immigrants create their own jobs, rather than robbing them from young Britons.