The National (Scotland):
Letters: BBC debates reveal how little they've progressed
7 June 2017
SOME time ago Paxman's questions to Mrs May exposed effectively how ineffective she had been at the Home Office in dealing with immigration. She could not explain how Conservative policy has completely failed in this area (even to reduce non-European immigrants). So I will explore the possible causes. As we have near full employment one must agree with Jonathan Wadsworth at London School of Economics that there is no statistical impact of immigrants on wages of UK workers. Scottish farmers have claimed that they can't get local workers for seasonal work, so need immigrants, and in Scotland EU nationals make up 3.4 per cent of the population but 4.5 per cent of the workforce. So they are vital and skilled workers. Now if industry (having benefited from five years of corporation tax concessions) is simply not training local workers then it's necessary for the Government to tax industry and spend major sums of money on training. And if years of austerity have not created a mood of business confidence in the UK (but instead has reduced consumer purchasing power) then perhaps the economy needs government stimulus to take us through the uncertainty which our changing trade relationship with Europe and other countries will create. Unless government spends a lot of money on skills training and infrastructure it is most unlikely that we will not see significant falls in immigration. So in five years time Mrs May will be facing the same questions from Paxman with the same lack of answers. Andrew Vass, Edinburgh
Related publications
‘Immigration and the UK Economy’, Jonathan Wadsworth, CEP 2017 General Election Analyses Paper No. 039, May 2017
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/ea039.pdf
‘Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK’, Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano, John Van Reenen and Jonathan Wadsworth, CEP Brexit Analysis Paper No.5, May 2016
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit05.pdf