Cutting immigration won't help youth unemployment

Heartless P.

Foolish Boy!

tariqr

Brilliant article - I love the Adam Smith Institute. Abolition of minimum wage and cutting of benefits would slash youth unemployment.

Rhoda Klapp

So the immigrants are creating a whole new class of jobs, which UK young people cannot do, but immigrant young people can? And not one, not one of those jobs would be available to a UK young person from the dole, who are not in fact all morons but some of whom are quite employable, but need a chance? I find the conclusions reached here to be a desperate case of finding the answer to be just what you were looking for. It will not wash.

..but the suggestion in the last para of reforming employment in terms of contract/self-employed has merit. Unfortunately it surely is pie in the sky, successive governments have frowned at the loss of control this leads to.

william

In West Sussex,you can have your car washed by hand in the supermarket car park for £5,invariably by an east european.Unskilled work,a first job?I would rather see my money providing employment to the indigenous youth population who do need more competition from outside for unskilled work.

strapworld

And the author is Head of Research! Marks out of ten 0!

In this country there are a certain amount of jobs. If a government allows untold millions of immigrants to enter it stands to reason, in my mind, that someone will not get a job.

Of course immigration affects employment prospects. Goodness me how can this blog allow such socialist nonsense. I do hope he was not paid for this.

Chris

"In this country there are a certain amount of jobs. If a government allows untold millions of immigrants to enter it stands to reason, in my mind, that someone will not get a job."

Don't you think you should bother to read the article before you comment? You might have learned something.

Verity

I find myself in unalloyed agreement with Rhoda Klapp's post, and cannot add to it.

Strapworld, you too.

toco

Sam Bowman you are an utter clot.Are you trying to say if none of these immigrants arrived on our shores we would have the same level of unemployment but at the same time hundreds of thousands of job vacancies?Not sure what you are on but is must be potently dangerous.

Tarka the Rotter

So, the education system is 'criminally bad' eh? Not in my neck of the woods it isn't, but then I live in a rural county which I have to say is homogenous in language and culture - unlike some inner city schools where there could be thirty different languages spoken in class - how do you raise standards when communication is difficult and sometimes basic? You accuse MigrationWatch of making sweeping statements then make some of your own. Mind you, the damage done to school curricula by the last government was immense, so I grant you that one.

Dennis Churchill

Yes without bipedal work units from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe we would just have to go without having Starbucks and Costa .No more cheap cleaners. No more minicab drivers. No more cheap car washes....it hardly bears thinking about.
Immigrant labour has been used to disguise the failures in our education and social systems. Without it we would have been forced to change both. All very short term, which is typical of the Baby Boomers.

Axstane

If there were not an unending stream of young East Europeans prepared to wait on tables, serve coffee and pull beer the price for those jobs would increase and so many more young British people would be drawn to them.

tariqr

@Axstane But that would increase costs of production, making coffee, beer etc. more expensive.

Dennis Churchill

Axstane
January 9th, 2012 6:23pm
As long as the differential between disposable income in those jobs and on unemployment benefit was enough to act as an incentive.

TomTom

* Researcher at The Blackstone Group
* Student Invigilator at University College Cork
* Quality Auditor at Apple Inc.

* Crew Person at McDonald's Corporation

Where does the Spectator get these idiots ? He clearly hasn't a clue and should get out in the world and see how student vacation jobs have disappeared and look in Northern England at youth unemployment both White and Non-White and then look at how youth unemployment fell in Poland, Latvia, Ukraine even

Halcyondaze

Say anything to defend immigration, eh?

This is one of the top three social / political issues of the age. It has totally transformed our cities within a couple of decades and the rest of the country is following right behind. Labour deliberately accelerated this process on a massive scale in order to "rub the Right's nose in it" and to ensure that a conservative, pro-British party never gained power again.

Living in London and doing a fair bit of travelling I observe on a daily basis the terrible damage this has done and continues to do to our national unity and identity. Nowehere do I recognise the alleged benefits that the left-wing metropolitan bubble-dwellers keep banging on about.

If I was a low income person desperate for work - which I soon could well be - I for one would be absolutely furious. That cannot bode well.

kein

read your article-wish I hadn't.

utter bollocks

When you get your head out your rear you may

see what we all can and you can't

Frothy

One Lump of labour fallacy or two?

Eric45

This is just "junk" analysis. As an engineer, and seeing those curves I would say immediately there is a correlation between immigration and youth unemployment, between 2004 and 2008. They may not mirror each other perfectly, but it is clearly there. Migrationwatch have build up a reputation over the years for solid research and academic rigour in producing these report's ,and I have no reason to question this one. However, proving a definitive causal link between youth unemployment and immigration would be almost impossible, as Mr Green pointed out this morning on the Today, programme.

Cynic

"The economy is not a simple set of simultaneous equations: curbing the number of motivated migrant workers who ask for low pay would not magically make British youngsters suitable for their jobs." Not given the amount they can pick up in benefits and the poor standard of education they've been exposed to over the last 15 years, I agree. Bring benefits more in line with what they can earn and you might have a chance, especially if benefits were time limited or withdrawn if a job they were capable of doing was refused. It makes no sense at all to import workers when we have so many of our own on the dole.

Edward McLaughlin

"The national minimum wage means that young people cannot get their first step on the ladder to gain experience that immigrants may already have..."

So, you DO in fact concede that said experienced immigrants are taking jobs which our own young people cannot. Compounded by other factors - here, the minimum wage.

Nobody is saying that immigration is the sole cause of youth unemployment, but it is definitely a major contributor - therefore its stricter control would help.

Your article evades this truth and, as a piece of reporting, it is a shambles. It seeks to hide from its readers the truth of what is happening, beneath a blanket of spurious and ill-applied statistics. This is not what responsible reporters and commentators are for, and it is entirely in tune with the general tenor here on this site.

Ed

On the other hand, I work for an immigrant came over here and started a factory, and now employs over 500 people.

Blummin foreigners coming over here, creating jobs for people.

strapworld

'Chris' you were saying?

Dimoto

A reasonable enough article, if a bit fundamentalist in it's suggestions.

But if you want the xenophobe tendency on the Coffee-House to understand the "lump of labour fallacy", I am afraid you will have to spell it out in words of one syllable

Fergus Pickering

Typical of the baby boomers? You mean all people of a certain age are to blame for everything? You CAN'T mean anything so puerile? How old are you,then, Churchill? Twat!

S Bertram

My 19 year old daughter now has a job after months of trying by internet or walking around London with her CV. On one occasion at a group interview given at a well known chain of cafe /deli establishments on Waterloo station she found herself the only English person in the room.Most couldn't even speak English.She was far more suited & qualified for the job than all the east europeans there.Guess who didn't get the job.Pure naked racism.I'm sure this was no way an isolated case.Still why would anyone employ our teenagers when there is plenty of immigrants to exploit.Our British kids should be given priority in jobs over immigrants without any shadow of a doubt.

frosty the polar bear

As a mere bear,
it seems an awfully strange co-incidence that the number of immigrants almost exactly matches the number of unemployed uk citizens.
if it walks like a walrus, talks like a walrus, as my old dad used to say.

Is there any truth in the rumour that Antony Worral Thompson's publishers are re-printing all his recipe books,
each recipe now starting with the words, " first, steal the ingredients"?
off to see the aurora,
toodle pip.

keith bibby

Employers do not have the incentive to train up the young as they are awash with cheep EU labour if British men get British jobs the money they receive will circulate in the British economy instead of the East European economy’s

The Institute for Public Policy Research says the study is "flawed".
It was them that encouraged new labour to open the floodgates spouting economic growth benefits.

But they where forgetting to factor in the effects on public services housing and decreasing wages for the indigenes working class.

The reason unemployment amongst the young started before 2004 is new labour turned a blind eye to mass illegal east European labour flooding in before this date

Edward McLaughlin

Ed

Fair play to your boss. But what has that one particular case got to do with the situation we are discussing?

Hundreds of thousands of cheap, undermining workers - here to better themselves, granted - but at what a cost to our young people and their attempts to start a career. Those careers would have been crucial to our long term national interests.

We are selling out. We sold the family silver back in the 80s. Now the livestock are being spirited out of the yard.

Dennis Churchill

Dimoto
January 9th, 2012 8:52pm
With a welfare state it is like the Lump of TV sets. Three million TV sets imported into the country while the government sets a floor price (welfare benefits) on home produced TVs should not make any difference to the sale of homemade TV sets.

M65

The horrific truth is that people like this are listened to, and even worse, their infantile opinions are acted upon by "those in power" - I despair.

Dennis Churchill

Frothy
January 9th, 2012 7:46pm
Our welfare system makes the lump of labour fallacy irrelevant as the state becomes an “employer” of the surplus unemployed.
It is this class of state employee, the unemployed, who we are considering with regard to open borders immigration.
The immigrants who clean the houses and offices also draw on the state in the form of housing benefit, medical care and other welfare benefits so are probably not net contributers.The young Britons who are unemployed have little incentive to work for less than they can get from welfare benefits, as unemployed, so industry looks for cheaper alternatives.
Like so much in economics the lump of labour fallacy relies on a model that can’t be universally applied.

Roy

By immigration you are covering up the bad side effects of government policy. No matter what excuses are given for its continuation immigration is an infamous desecration of the rights of British born nationals. Immigration has been good for countries with space or countries with an inborn ability to thrive on little but their own ingenuity. Britain's management since Thatcher has been decrepit. Everything they have done has turned to custard. They are not making the country work for its living. The one Party that could have given a new beginning has forsaken strong well worn beliefs for more of the same ... unbridled socialism, along with a partnership with the devils helmsman.

Donald Fraser

It is the amplification of 2004, stupid!

Economic history periodically reveals the dangers in treating labour as if were just like capital & goods, malleable in a divine economic equation. Western leaders are united in support of the amplification of 2004, but by little else. The truth is:

The youth of Western Europe is being sacrificed & those of Eastern Europe rewarded.

Supplementary use of mercenaries in The Medieval Ages is the best parallel to draw.

Like mercenaries, Eastern Europeans will run away as soon as pay day is missed.

Patriotism is not about labour, capital or goods. Miss one pay day & it will be learnt.

Read Generational War 2.0 available from trulyspecialrelationship.co.uk

daniel maris

We can see from this just how dangerous these Adam Smith ideologues are to our national well being. Migration Watch are one of the few organisations in public life that you can actually trust. They have been proved right time and time again. It isn't at all surprising that the extreme ideologues of capitalism at the ASI want to destroy national identity and tear down borders so that capitalists can exploit labour freely from all parts of the globe. Of one thing you can be sure: their children don't attend schools where 50 home languages are spoken. Their kids will be in the private, cordoury knickerbocker school where English is the only language spoken.

Ruby Duck

I think he's saying something like jobs increase in direct proportion to the availabiity of suitably qualified applicants.

Could be true. Nothing much makes sense these days.

JOHN1059

Mass migration is just one giant Ponzi scam- as soon as this generation of migrants get on benefits or pensions, we will need even more millions of migrants to pay & care for them

Clear Memories

Truth be told, there is very little youth unemployment - but a hell of a lot of unemployables!

Radford NG

If unemployment has not risen along with mass immigration the answer is Simple...Blair/Brown created millions of "wako-non-jobs" for native Britons in the public sector at public expense.

Frothy

'Our welfare system makes the lump of labour fallacy irrelevant'

The Nobel prize remains out of your grasp Dennis. Where's your evidence that the state acts as employer of the last resort? There's none. Migration Watch's analysis is partisan nonsense as the ASI point out.

michael

Run a straight 'median' line through each of those graphs from 2005/6... shock horror they're all but parallel. Hmm no correlation?
-Don't you just love stats.

Dennis Churchill

Frothy
January 10th, 2012 7:23am
So you won’t be putting me forward for it? A disappointment, but I’ll get over it.
It is about classification. One way of classifying someone who receives a regular amount of money from the state is that they are employed by the state. A Diversity Officer on £40K and final salary pension is on better conditions than an unemployed father of four living in Tower Hamlets, but he too receives regular payments from the state. Job seeker’s allowance, housing benefit, various other means tested benefits which brings his disposable income to around the same as he would earn working in a restaurant waiting on tables.

Dennis Churchill

Frothy
January 10th, 2012 7:23am
Con/t
The lump of labour fallacy can be used to illustrate the way labour was displaced,say,from agriculture when the tractor was widely introduced but even then it would have caused a period of very high unemployment before increased productivity created jobs in other areas.
It is the existence of a welfare state that needs to be factored in. If it had existed when farm labourers trudged to the industrialised areas for work do you think they would have bothered?

Rhoda Klapp

The number of jobs is not fixed. The lump of labour fallacy is a fallacy indeed. But for the post to be true, every immigrant must come to a new job which would not have arisen if he had not come. That is a bit of a stretch, isn't it?

anthony.scholefield

The so called 'free market ' arguments for immigration are wrong as they neglect the fact that an immigrant immediately needs his share of a society's capital goods such as roads,dams,houses.offices etc.In the UK this amounts to about £280,000 for a family of 4. The average low paid immigrant may save say £1000 p.a and therefore may partly fund his share of the INCREASE in capital stock but where exactly does he get his initial stock-the £280-,000 -from.

Yes its from existing natives.

This assumes of course that he makes no foreign remittances.Should he remit his savings then he does not fund his share of the annual increase in capital stock.

Finally capital stock figures are neormous in relation to income.

Seneca

Apart from a few months in the 1980's, when my firm in the West Midlands went under and it took a while to find a job, I have never been unemployed, nor found it difficult to get a decent position. However having lost my last 'proper' job nearly for years ago, I have yet to find a decent permanent position; I exist doing fairly demeaning and undemanding work ( three at the same time) for a pittance. I soon realised four years ago that the slavic invasion had altered the job market in the UK , and that many Uk nationals were being denied work as employers wanted to go for the 20 year old Polish worker. Only people who are not directly affected by this position, such as the complacent author of the article deny this.

James

Christ, it's almost as if I'd stepped in to the comments section of the Daily Wail! Well done Sam Bowman for pointing out the obvious.

The rest of you howling at the article are nothing but armchair economists, applauding junk statistics, as Bowman points out.

More articles like this, please!

DavidDP

Never mind facts, what we want is truthiness.

TomTom

"We can see from this just how dangerous these Adam Smith ideologues are to our national well being."

In the 1970s IEA Pamphlets were interesting, in contrast the ASI is simply a bunch of St Andrews' Alumni who peddle Ideology in place of Analysis and employ dolts fresh out of University Unions to save money. Just read their Website "We offer internships to current university students or recent graduates, and places are open to all nationalities (although the UK's immigration laws can make it difficult for people from some countries)."

Dennis Churchill

Rhoda Klapp
January 10th, 2012 10:14am
A better illustration than the fallacy of the lump of labour is to think of immigration causing a shift in labour supply. In a model free economy this results in reducing the cost of labour and so increases the demand. But we are not in a free economy as the state sets a minimum income with welfare benefits. If the reduced cost of employing labour is less than that labour can receive in unemployment benefits there is a disincentive to seek work.
I referred to baby boomers in an earlier post because there are short term benefits to importing cheap immigrant labour (bipedal work units as free marketers think of them)but these benefits are not universal ,they benefit the established , financially secure ,section of society who are not competing for jobs,housing,education for their children, healthcare etc with these immigrants, but do benefit from cheap and plentiful labour.
A bit more honesty about how good it is to be able to afford domestic help and less hypocrisy about the benefits of multiculturalism would be appreciated from the Chattering Classes.

Frothy

More here -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16484918

Suggests the debate is more finely balanced than I'd suggested! But for us free market types, the free flow of labour is, in the main, a good thing for prosperity in the long run.

Rosa

if this man is head of reasearch at the Adam Smith institue then there is a bigger problem than we thought....

Yam Yam

Sidestepping not all employment regulation surely, Sam.

After all, I'm sure you wouldn't want to be dismissed because you succumb to a disability; or your wife to be sacked because she finds herself expecting your next child!

frothy

This is an interesting addition to the debate, which undermines my argument a bit (such as it is)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16484918

PayDirt

The value of UK’s capital goods (£280,000 per family of 4?) should be base on what value the goods can produce, not what they cost in the first place. What they cost is dead and buried, the value lies in the future revenues they help produce. Hence the more workers (immigrants included) who produce value via the UK’s capital the better. On the question of immigrants, there may be an optimum number, above which more will have negative result.

Patricia

"Mass migration is just one giant Ponzi scam- as soon as this generation of migrants get on benefits or pensions, we will need even more millions of migrants to pay & care for them." John1059.
Spot on. Why don't the Government realise this simple fact ? Depending on immigrant labour to "help the economy" is a journey without end.

Verity

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084667/UK-unemployment-23-fewer-Britons-jobs-100-migrants.html

The article above proves the claim that immigrants aren't taking jobs from the British.

As far as I am concerned, this is just another cog in the lefty determination ... yes, sly, creepy Jack Straw, I'm looking at you ... to destroy Britain.

Dennis Churchill

frothy
January 10th, 2012 12:59pm

The arguments, unfortunately, are rarely expressed honestly.
Whether it is about non-EU immigration, which is controllable so tends to be quickly passed over by the political class despite it being more than EU immigration, or our own ideological beliefs or self interest.
You admit to being a believer in a free market and no doubt others here are internationalists, both groups believe in the free movement of labour regardless of how it affects individual countries. This is a rare issue where the right and left agree.
The beneficial economic argument is weak because our welfare state distorts the labour market.
The social arguments expressed above that immigration allows failure in our social and education systems to be disguised is in my view valid. From a selfish point of view cheap labour benefits those that employ it and do not compete with it for work, housing or a share of public funded services. It disadvantages those that do need to compete which tend to be the young.

M65

@James
I'm sure that your Lithuanian char & your Ukranian car washer are grateful for your support of the infantile Mr Bowman.
I'm in full agreemant with anthony, I know for a fact ( and yes, I do work as a menial labourer)that every Litas & Grivna available will be sent overseas whilst the infrastructure here falls to pieces, and no, that's not the latte coffee table things like queues into Islington or the state of the Notting Hill carnival lately, but the drains, the sewers, the footpaths the bridges, the public services.
Do your research before you feel coherent enough to take on the arguement.

Stevo

Am I the only sane man left? Net immigration last year was 252,000. Those new people have to live somewhere. Work somewhere. Use hospitals, roads and schools. Are you seriously telling me that a city the size of Brighton is being created-infrastructure and empoyment wise every year? Utter, utter garbage. If the immigration avalanche that occured under Nulabour and has continued under the Coalition hadn't happened then 3 million fewer people would be here. What's our unemployment standing at now?

Dennis Churchill

M65
January 10th, 2012 5:09pm
The Telegraph today publishes figures showing that one in three Liverpool homes have no one in work. The Adam Smith Institute needs to revise the fallacy of the lump of labour in light of the Giro economy.
M65—you feel the pinch, they don’t: yet.

Bea

Does the Adam Smith institute realise that under 25s are already subject to lower levels of benefits, particuarly housing benefit, than other adults? Where do they think the "flab" is in £53.45pw JSA?