FOUR out of FIVE new jobs went to foreigners in the past decade, new report reveals

Sarcasm or 🤖?

There's this thing on the entry documents for people taking up these jobs. No Recourse to Public Funds.

That means that they aren't eligible to claim benefits.

The data source may be reliable but the interpretation is way off:

The report looks at the net change in PAYE-recorded positions over a decade (roughly 3.7 million additional jobs) and subtracts the net change for British nationals versus foreign nationals. It does not mean that out of every 5 people hired in the UK, 4 were immigrants. Millions of British-born workers retire, change jobs, or leave the workforce each year and are replaced by other British workers. Focusing only on net growth misrepresents what’s happening.

Out of roughly 32 million PAYE employees in the UK, the vast majority—around 25.6 million—are British citizens. Conflating a fraction of net job growth with the composition of the entire working population creates a false impression that foreign workers dominate the British labor market, and is at best stupid and at worst deliberately designed to inflame anti-migrant sentiment.

The report ignores economic demand; health and social care, hospitality, and seasonal agriculture all experienced sharp demand increases over the past decade. Migrant workers in these sectors often fill critical shortages rather than directly displacing qualified local workers who are otherwise seeking those specific roles, or the old ‘I don’t want to do care work’ conundrum.

IPSO ruled repeatedly that this is not what the data says.

The Times has already updated their headline to "Nearly three million foreigners added to UK workforce since 2014" and published a correction

Surely not. If the vacancy is for a specialist Surgical Lead in the NHS, I'd quite like that role to be filled by someone qualified to perform it, not any old NEET.

I can't imagine that anyone has ever been influenced by the rubbish posted on MN. I would be very worried if anyone is using this forum as a source of information to inform their choice of political party in an election. You only have to look back through previous threads at the time of GEs to see how ridiculous that would be.

Having worked in social care I'm not surprised. You simply cannot get (white) British people to do care work. They generally don't even apply, those that do are poorly suited (applied to meet job centre requirements), if they do get the job, they phone in sick a lot and quit easily because it's a hard job and poorly paid - as it's often funded via the council, wages won't go up as people don't want their tax to go up.

Pre-brexit, it was lots of eastern Europeans doing care work, but that stopped with Brexit so now it's lots of African and Asian immigration.

The industry would be screwed without them to be honest. Wages in care are so closely tied to council tax that it'll only ever be minimum wage and why would anyone do care work who didn't need to? Its hardly well regarded despite being such a critical and important job.

To add that includes one Ian Duncan Smith who is also involved in the group that commissioned the report. So well done him! 👍

Assuming that’s true (not accusing you of anything, just haven’t checked it myself) then British youth were royally fucked over with Brexit.

I’m in the Netherlands and we have a massive labour shortage, to the point where more and more shop staff don’t speak Dutch.

There was/is even a scheme to bring British bus drivers over as we are so short of public transport workers.

How horribly unfair that young Brits are unable to find work when we’re pleading for staff over here.

We have had a Points based system for decades. Long before Brexit.
There are shortage occupations listed.
But employers do not only recruit for shortage occupations. They can become sponsors ( and do) and recruit without the need to prove they could have found someone in the UK to do the job.

Seems like a totally unbiased and legitimate source of information.

*maths

Exactly where a Russian bot would want to be

Which was actively campaigned for by the same right wing pundits and politicians now decrying it and trying to drum up outrage.

Please forgive the ChatGPT content but I asked it to assess the statement in the OP for credibility and bias. I think it produced a pretty good summary:

I’d regard it as reporting a genuine statistical trend through a strongly slanted frame. The numbers are broadly credible; the headline and implied explanation are much less reliable.
There are three separate issues:
Aspect My assessment
Underlying figures
Broadly credible: they come from HMRC payroll records.
Description of those figures
Misleading: “jobs created were taken by migrants” turns a net change in employment into a claim about recruitment.
Explanation linking immigration to benefit dependency
Not demonstrated by the figures quoted. Two increases occurring together do not establish causation.

The main problem is substantive, rather than just emotive wording. A reader would reasonably understand the headline to mean that employers created new vacancies and chose migrants for 80% of them. The dataset does not show that. It compares payroll totals at two dates, incorporating people entering and leaving employment. HMRC also explicitly warns that its nationality classification includes some people who have subsequently become British citizens. Omitting those distinctions materially changes the meaning.

The language then pushes a particular interpretation. “Taken by migrants”, “written off” and “taxpayers forced to absorb the cost” encourage readers to see migrant employment and British benefit receipt as opposing sides of the same transaction. Saying “the think-tank warned” attributes the argument, which is better than presenting it as an established finding, but does not supply evidence for it.

The CSJ’s inquiry is chaired by former Conservative work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and explicitly argues for linked welfare and immigration reform. That political perspective does not invalidate its calculations, but its interpretation should be examined as an argument rather than treated as a neutral statistical conclusion.

There is also selective context: the same HMRC publication shows slightly higher median monthly earnings for EU and non-EU employees than for UK employees. That does not settle the economic effects of migration, but it complicates the accompanying narrative about reliance on low-skilled overseas labour.

My verdict: credible evidence that migrants account for a large share of net payroll growth, but misleading reporting of what that means and insufficient evidence for the suggested displacement of British workers. I would not describe the passage as balanced or unbiased. Equally, the figures alone cannot prove that immigration had no effect on employment opportunities—that requires a different kind of analysis.

Not only IDS but a Tim "too far right for reform" Montgomerie "impartial" study.

Foreign workers definitely prop up the NHS. Ageing gammons still believe the rot they are fed by the daily mail.

So it's an employer problem then? Is that what you are saying?

I think you need better sources OP, call me a cynic but I feel you’ve been sent to stir hate not for a reasonable discussion .

This really isn’t very surprising given that we have government schemes aimed at encouraging people to come here from overseas to fill roles across sectors like care, medicine and agriculture.

It's a way of contacting a lot of people though.

We moved to a points based immigration system where the government would identify roles on which there was a shortage and then make it easier/possible to get a visa for those jobs rather than an employer having to request visas. Also there was a minimum income requirement.
This was something that the right wing press really wanted at the time. There was much talk of having an "Australian style points based system" and how Brexit would make this possible. I said at the time that a "points based" system would potentially benefit employers but reduce the incentive for employers/government to spend money training young people or raising wages. (It does make sense for seasonal farm work TBF).
However, we had Brexit, we got the Australian points based system. People still complain that there is too much immigration and we need an Australian style points based system. Sigh.

But the 8 million people on MN vote.

There’s a very good reason why it’s hard to find people for traditionally female tasks like caring, cleaning, nursing and even teaching.

This. It's all very well for degree educated Mumsnetters to virtue signal about how anti racist they are about immigrants but they aren't the ones who are faced with applying for hundreds of jobs at minimum wage that they can't get and are languishing on benefits. Employers want staff that they don't have to bother to train, so drain other countries of their trained staff. The health and care visa was designed to cover a shortfall of 30-50k people. 600, 000 visas were issued due to the botched post Brexit visa system set up by the Johnson government. The rest of these people aren't working in care. They are working in shops, some illegally, deliveroo drivers etc, so they are taking minimum wage jobs in areas like hospitality and retail that young people could be doing to at least get on the ladder of working, or be trained into.

The 4 out of 5 number has been pulled together by looking at the net increase in jobs which is misleading.

In 2014 UK nationals held 88% of jobs and by 2025 that had dropped to 80%. So the non UK share has increased but saying they’ve had 4 out of 5 jobs is obviously ridiculous.