FIGURES published last month showed that British net migration was 330,000 in the year to March, the highest on record. This confirmed what was already clear: recent efforts to halt immigration have been largely futile. With freedom of movement guaranteed in the European Economic Area (EEA), the Conservative-led coalition was forced to focus on reducing immigration from elsewhere. In 2011, a range of restrictions on non-EEA immigration were introduced. Populist politicians have bemoaned their narrow focus; economists the impact they have had on business.
New research will infuriate the former and provide some consolation to the latter. According to a paper by Cinzia Rienzo of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and Carlos Vargas-Silva of Oxford University, restricting high-skilled non-European migration has not only had little impact on the overall number of people coming to Britain, it may also have encouraged migration from Europe.
The researchers used the rate of growth in the number of high-skilled migrants prior to the introduction of restrictions in 2011, adjusting for labour-market conditions, to create a counterfactual in which laws restricting high-skilled non-European migration had not been passed. Under such a scenario, the number of educated migrants coming to Britain from both...Continue reading
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