Immigration and the UK Labour Market

Jonathan Wadsworth

CEP Election Analysis Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: During periods of strong economic growth, migration is and has always been important for filling gaps in the labour market. Perceptions do not seem to line up with the existing academic evidence. On balance, the evidence for the UK labour market suggests that fears about adverse consequences of rising immigration in general and EU immigration in particular have still not, on average, materialised. It is hard to find evidence of much displacement of UK workers or lower wages, on average. Immigrants, especially in recent years, tend to be younger and better educated than the UK-born and less likely to be unemployed. Future migration trends will, as ever, depend on relative economic performance and opportunity. But we still need to know more about the effects of rising immigration beyond the labour market in such areas as prices, health, crime and welfare.

Keywords: immigration; European Union; UK; government policy; education; labour market; jobs; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-mfd and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/ea019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepeap:019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Election Analysis Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().