Iain Duncan Smith is not “daring to tell the truth” about migrant workers

Iain Duncan-Smith's 'bravery' on immigration may have played well on the Daily Mail, but it ignored several inconvenient facts.

Ruth Grove-White is a policy officer at the Migrants’ Rights Network

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has reignited the migrant workers debate, with controversial comments reminiscent of Gordon Brown’s disastrous statement advocating ‘British jobs for British workers’ back in 2007.

Mr Duncan Smith’s provocative speech, delivered in Madrid yesterday, was prominently trailed in the Daily Mail, which expressed relief that the former Tory leader is ‘daring to tell the truth’ about migrant workers. However, a closer look suggests that we may be being led astray once more on this issue.

The bottom line in Duncan Smith’s argument is that British welfare reforms can never succeed without tighter immigration controls to squash the competition for semi- and low-skilled work faced by resident job-seekers.

His view is that British businesses got too used to ‘falling back’ on employing migrant workers rather than Brits under New Labour – and that without more immigration controls ‘we will risk losing another generation to dependency and hopelessness’.

Let’s deal with the question of which migrants we are talking about first. The fastest growing group of low-skilled migrant workers in the UK over the past decade has been people from Eastern Europe, whose numbers rose from 4,000 to 239,000 between 2002 and 2011. EU freedom of movement rights allow them to come here to work.

The UK no longer has any low-skilled work route from outside the EU, although significant numbers of people born outside the EU are working in low-skilled occupations in the UK. However, this group are primarily family members of migrants or Brits, people who have settled or naturalised here, or Brits born abroad. All this means that there are many people working here whose numbers the Government simply cannot limit, whatever Duncan Smith would like to see.

But let’s not panic, because evidence that migration has negative impacts on low-skilled British job-seekers is mixed.

Although low-skilled migrant worker numbers did rise substantially under the last government, there is mixed evidence about whether they had a displacement effect on resident workers, with many researchers struggling to find the evidence for this. Although there is some evidence (pdf) of slight wage depression at the bottom end of the labour market, this is not overwhelming.

Going back to Mr Duncan Smith, why, given all this, might he have launched such an attack on labour immigration today? He has just launched his £5bn Work Programme, which aims to help 2.4 million people get into work amid major cuts to the welfare bill. Given the UK’s faltering economic growth and high unemployment levels there are plenty of reasons why his major reforms might fail to deliver – but they have little to do with immigration controls.

Much more important than waving a stick at migrant workers and encouraging UK plc to discriminate against them in favour of Brits would be to take a long hard look at why some major sectors of the economy including hospitality, financial services, and healthcare have become rather dependent upon migrant workers.

Much wider regulatory measures would need to be put in place to make many of these jobs appealing to the British workforce, including addressing minimum wage enforcement and working conditions. Long-term investment in ensuring that the skills needed by employers can be found in the residential workforce will also be needed.

Unfortunately, there is no quick solution to the problem of unemployment in the UK. But we should know by now that blaming immigration is not the answer either.

31 Responses to “Iain Duncan Smith is not “daring to tell the truth” about migrant workers”

  1. Fred Willey

    Thatcher acted to save the country from bankruptcy following the Wilson-Callaghan government; The coalition are doing their best to save us from the financial and moral meltdown left by Blair-Brown. Nomatter what your politics or financial fantasy, economics, the law of the jungle, ultimately rules. You can not demand what you do not have, you can only have the “rights” which your resources can support, only maintain the justice which the people can sustain.
    Thatcher seemed harsh, but what alternative? She saved us from ruin.

  2. Leon Wolfson

    Ed; “Falling” unemployment is based, as I’ve said before, on a survey. Given the JSA seeker numbers rose, I would have to see a sustained trend in the survey results – not just a one-off – to believe that’s really happening.

    Also, denial over jobs AND denial over the damage thatcher did? Heh.

    Fred – Because we owe the debt internation…oh, it’s mostly internal. Right. And we have our own currency. And what’s this, most of the coalition “cuts” are ideological? And business rates seem to be slashed. And they’re making the UK a tax ha… no, don’t believe a word you posted.

  3. Fred Willey

    Leon: Time to start joined up thinking or you will be left in chaos now the sofa is empty. The top brass became so wealthy and the workers so poor when Blair-Brown unpicked the better side of Wilson-Callaghan. Now we run on the treadmill, family life hard to sustain. The checkout girl will sit for 6 hours but the union cared not a jot, pension funds were raided, still without a care. Its only worth the effort when real damage could be done, to an imagined foe.
    It is all a compromise, but so right that all apply our common sense.

  4. Leon Wolfson

    “Joined up thinking”? Ah, is that what you call conflating factors and getting into a muddle.

    I’m a mutualist, I *certainly* have strong views on income inequality…and a good part of the CAUSE is the weakness of unions. and the blatent favouritism shown to unearned income (i.e. lower tax rates on non-income profits) and larger corporations. Oh, and exclusionary policies, which are already blocking skilled workers from bringing investment and jobs here.

  5. Anil Hadij

    Yes my name is not local, but I’m third generation, so don’t start with flippant put downs and I count myself British.

    Leon explain to me the benefits of increasing immigration when our country faces 2.8 million unemployed, what are the benefits for these unemployed people of immigration into their communities.

    And if you do think their are benefits how can Labour offer a government to meet the aspirations of these new immigrants when the conditions of the newly immigrant and existing peoples, i.e, You, Me, Fred & Ed, are undergoing profound changes, as well as providing the economic conditions that make it viable to get say a million of the 2.8 million back into employment which is sustainable for them as individuals, not as a statistic, rather than for good of the margins of the institutions employing them?

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