Cutting immigration won’t help youth unemployment

Reading the papers today, you could be forgiven for thinking that MigrationWatch’s new report was a smoking gun against immigration. Here we have a study that links immigration to unemployment, in the face of nearly all previous research that has found no such link. However, looking at the MigrationWatch piece itself, it quickly becomes clear how implausible these claims are.

The MigrationWatch report centres on a comparison of rising youth unemployment and rising immigration from the ‘A8’ countries – the Eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004. The correlation between the two is remarkably weak. During the initial rise in immigration between 2004 and the end of 2008, there is no significant rise in unemployment at all. From 2009, there is no close correlation between the two figures either; both immigration and unemployment have been rising since then, but the rise in immigration has followed the rise in unemployment.