Mass immigration threatens the UK’s booming economy
THE jobs news keeps getting better. According to the latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics, we now have record levels of employment and the lowest figures for joblessness for more than a decade.
Between last December and this February unemployment fell from the previous three months by 45,000 to 1.56 million – the lowest level since 2006. And as a proportion of the working population, joblessness is now just 4.7 per cent, the lowest since 1975.
The numbers in work are even more stellar – up over the same quarter by 39,000 to 31.84 million. On top of that, there are also a record 767,000 vacancies. No wonder it is known as the British jobs miracle.
But even though the British economy is showing the rest of the world how to deliver jobs, the benefit of those jobs is not always going to British workers. Unemployment is at its lowest in absolute terms for a decade. But there are still 1.56 million working age Britons – between 16 and 64 – who are not in work. Now consider this: the latest figures show that one in nine workers is a migrant.
Last year, 3.4 million of the 30.3 million workforce were born abroad with 2.2million of them coming from the EU. That is double the number from just six years ago in 2010, when 1.1 million workers came from the EU. Back then 2.2 million of our 28.2 million employees were migrants.
AND the numbers and the scale of increase are startling. In 1997, when Tony Blair first won power, about three per cent of the workforce came from overseas. And that was unusually high compared with previous decades. Today, the ONS figures show that 11.2 per cent of people working in Britain are foreign nationals.
It is easy to understand why. Whatever Project Fear may have forecast, our economy is doing even better since the referendum vote than before. And with open borders to EU nationals – we remain, of course, members of the EU for the next two years – it would be strange if they did not move here.
It is a perfectly rational move by the people who come to