UK Central Bank Report Confirms Immigration Leads to Lower Wages for Nearly 1/4 of Britons

Britain’s central bank, the Bank of England, has stated that the high level of immigration that Britain is currently experiencing does in fact lead to lower wages, with those hurt most by the policy being on the semi-skilled or unskilled end of the country’s workforce: almost 1 in 4 Britons.

{snip}

The Bank of England concludes in its new report entitled ‘The impact of immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain’:

This paper asks whether immigration has any impact on wages. It answers this question by considering the variation of wages and immigration across regions, occupations, and time. Occupations turn out to be a relatively important dimension. Once the occupational breakdown is incorporated into a regional analysis of immigration, the immigrant-native ratio has a significant small impact on the average occupational wage rates of that region. Closer examination reveals that the biggest effect is in the semi/unskilled services sector, where a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants is associated with a 2 percent reduction in pay. Where immigrants come from–EU or non-EU–appears to have no impact on our economy wide results; with the impact within the semi/unskilled services sector being small. These findings accord well with intuition and anecdotal evidence, but do not seem to have been recorded previously in the empirical literature.

{snip}

UKIP’s Migration Spokesman Steven Woolfe MEP said today: “Since I have been the UKIP spokesman on Migration, along with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, I have been arguing that mass uncontrolled migration pushes down the wages of the low paid in Britain. This is not the first report which came to the same conclusion. In fact, Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney also recently accepted that unsustainable levels of migration causes wage compression some time ago.

{snip}

“Until policymakers in this country stop being apologists for mass migration it excuses them from dealing with the consequences of a dispossessed, impoverished, UK native ‘underclass’. Successive Labour and Tory governments have been warned about this but done nothing.”

{snip}