Are ordinary Brits disadvantaged in the labour market because of immigration?
I realise that most of my liberal graduate friends will automatically reject such an idea, in particular because there is an unstated assumption in the question that the ordinary Brits being hard done by are white, and the immigrants being given preferential treatment aren’t.
But the more I think about it the harder it is to dismiss – if it isn’t true then why did the UK import 100,000s of unskilled migrants when we have 100,000s unskilled people already in the UK who are unemployed?
The reasons behind this are some serious problems with our labour markets and benefits systems, that have been made worse but over a decade of bad policy.
Labour mobility
There are lots of people in the UK who only want unskilled work, but who live in parts of the country where supply of unskilled labour outstrips demand. This is true in the North East; we have too many people who want unskilled manual work, and not enough employers who want to hire these workers. At the same time there are parts of the UK who want unskilled manual workers, but can’t get them.
For lots of people it is hard to up sticks and move around the country. They have family commitments, or they are carers. Lots of people on low wages are dependent on family to provide child care so they can work. Over the last 14 years there has been a concerted effort by the Government to reduce the role of the state in supporting families, and people have been told to rely upon their own families and networks of support to care and look after each other. However well intentioned that might have been it has trapped people in areas where they can’t find work.
It is incredibly hard financially to leave a poor (cheap) part of the country and move to a more affluent (expensive) one to look for work, and the benefit system penalises people who try to do so.
There are also some cultural attitudes to contend with, some people just don’t want to leave the town where they grew up. Ironically people who never stray too far from home are some of the most hard core Brexiters and Reform voters.
People who are immigrants to the UK are generally much more willing to go anywhere where the work is. They don’t have the same family ties or commitments, nor are they emotionally invested in a particular home town. This makes it much easier to take advantage of opportunities in the labour market
Government policy has made this worse. Every time the Government inflates house prices in affluent parts of the UK it makes it more expensive for people to move there for work. The last 14 years of house price bubbles have created huge problems for labour mobility, a major cause of structural unemployment.
Health
UK unemployed have very high levels of ill health. Fourteen years of NHS cuts has made this much worse; it is harder and harder to get treatment, particularly after Covid.
This is an area where “tough” benefit rules make unemployment worse. It is incredibly difficult for people who have health problems to get the support they need, and navigating the benefit system to access help they are entitled to is incredibly hard. This creates a huge disincentive to find work. If it took someone 6 months to get their benefits sorted out they will be reluctant to take a job if they think they might be back on benefits again in the near future.
Immigrants on the whole are much healthier, and much less reliant on help with sickness or disabilities. They find it easier to move into employment, and because they are fitter are much more valuable to employers.
Entrepreneurship
People who come to the UK as immigrants are much more likely to set up a new business, than the local workforce. This is particularly true in poor areas, where immigrant owned businesses are often are the majority of locally owned businesses. These start ups are often long hours, hard work and insecure, which means that local people are reluctant to come off benefits to join them, given how long it would take them to get their benefits back if the job doesn’t work out. It takes 5 weeks from making a claim to getting benefits.
Lots of immigrants if they like an area but can’t find the job they like will set up a business of their own. Local residents, particularly in poor areas, rarely do this. I think some of this is cultural. Again the benefit system makes it very hard for people to move from unemployment to setting up a business, and when people do set up businesses they are restricted by lack of access to capital.
Most of these problems could be addressed by making the benefits system more flexible not harsher and more rigid. This is unpopular with voters, but there needs to be some honestly about the benefit system. We also need to fundementally rethink how the state supports families, whether it is help for child care, or support for carers, or the state expanding it’s rule in helping people
Over the last 14 years the Government has spent £15bn on implementing Universal Credits. This was supposed to have solved lots of the disincentives to people moving into work, but has been a clossal failure; administering DWP costs over £10bn per year; benefit fraud is at the highest level on record.
Sanctions are an important part of making the benefit system work but that doesn’t mean that more sanctions work better. We have made the benefit system too complex, too expensive to administer, yet too easy to cheat. Making the system simpler, cheaper to run, and easier to access isn’t politically popular, but it is the only way to get people off benefits and into work. When the benefit system breaks down, it has a huge impact on the Labour market
So if you want to get people back to work and off benefits, and you want to cut immigration you need to stop demanding harsher and harsher benefit rules. They are the problem not the solution.
Some people might wonder why I chose today to ask such a provocative question, but understanding this is the best way to understand why Reform won it’s first seats in Parliament this week. Statistically speaking agreeing with this statement “it is likely that white people are unable to find work because employers are hiring minorities instead” is the best determinant for voting for far right parties around the world.
Changing benefit rules won’t drain support from Reform overnight, but it is an important first step in making the Labour market work again.
To what extent are third-world immigrants advantaged relative to the white working class, in that their older, less healthy and less productive family members are likely to be back in the third-world country where they can be cared for far more cheaply?
It’s a good point. The changes to the benefit system in the Cameron/Osborne/Age of Austerity were meant to give more responsiblity to families to look after each other rather than the state. Instead it just made labour markets less flexible as people with carers duties, or dependent on families to help, couldn’t move around the country looking for work. Immigrants don’t always have that problem. They go where the jobs are