Unskilled migrants keep wages low, says PM

BORIS Johnson has vowed to boost the wages of the low-paid by curbing the numbers of unskilled workers coming into the country.

The Prime Minister yesterday insisted that overall immigration numbers would fall – although he refused to say by how much.

Mr Johnson said Tory plans for a pointsbased system would bring an end to ‘uncontrolled immigration’. Appearing on BBC Breakfast, he said: ‘We have been running very high rates of immigration for a long time. When it comes to unskilled immigration for people who don’t have a job to come to, we will get the numbers down.

‘I am not going to get into a numbers game. What we can do is bring immigration down for unskilled people who don’t have jobs to go to.’ He added: ‘This is an amazing place to be, to grow up, to live and we are going to take this country forward in all sorts of extraordinary ways, but very high levels of immigration – the size of a large town coming in every year – are putting strains on public services and over the past 20 years unskilled immigration has certainly helped to keep wages down.’

The Tories promised in their 2010, 2015 and 2017 election manifestos to cut net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’, but it was never met. When asked about NHS staff, Mr Johnson said that the Conservatives were introducing new fast-track visas for nurses, ‘not just from other EU countries but from across the world’.

Later, during a phone-in on BBC Radio 5 Live, a caller asked whether the country would still be able to rely on the ‘talent pool’ in European countries.

He replied: ‘We’ll make sure that everybody in every sector of the UK economy is able to attract workers from around the world.’