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

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.

Exactly where a Russian bot would want to be

*maths

Seems like a totally unbiased and legitimate source of information.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sarcasm or 🤖?

Did your DC apply for jobs in health and social care?

Orrrrrrrrrrrrr, I could give myself as an example, perhaps. I’m a foreigner, came to do my PHD in the UK. Then I got a 50k job (in 2015, mind you), never claimed any benefits, never used the NHS - I would just fly home to do whatever I wanted without having to wait for weeks to be seen by a GP. By 2020 I was on 80k, and by 2022 on 150k. And that’s pretty much the path all of our foreigner friends have taken. Live and let live.

Exactly!

The report is ADDITIONAL vacancies, and includes a large swathe of jobs in sectors which were (are…) desperately short of workers. It’s not 80% of jobs are given to migrants.

I knew after reading OP’s post that this thread was going to be mostly others shouting bot. The predictably is getting boring now and it’s a lazy attempt at an answer for when people have no response and want to shut down any opinion that’s different to their own.

There is a mistaken belief that only posh young people with degrees on gap years benefitted from the freedom to work in the EU we had before Brexit. This was categorically not true. I know anecdotes aren't data but I knew people in Germany and the Netherlands in "trades" that came to work from the UK. It's. It just about money, it's also nice as a young person to have the freedom to try out new places etc and since carpenters etc are in demand in most places they had that.

That was an opportunity that young British people had in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s which todays generation of young people don't have. However there is a refusal to believe this is the case. People will insist to you that it's only British people with degrees who wants to work abroad for some reason.

Thanks for sharing - that’s much easier to understand too!

Yes, you have to have a person with the skills and qualifications for that, correct.

Social media is a huge influencer of public opinion.

Where do you think the term influencer comes from?
Why do companies spend billions on social media advertising?

I work for a company that employees a high, high majority of overseas workers. We have probably 15% British workers out of 2500 at one site.
It's a running dark humour joke in our department when a British person starts because the work is manual and it is hard, and I could bet my paycheck on a young 16 to 25 year old British man quitting within a week. I am always right. I am British. I don't think employers should be allowed to pay crap wages to employ overseas workers. However, some roles, the younger British generation think a life on benefits is EASIER than a life working. So what are you meant to do when you need staff to keep your company running.

Regarding your source : “A 2023 assessment by Who Funds You? gave the CSJ a D transparency grade, indicating limited disclosure under that assessment's criteria” only name attached to it seems to be Iain Duncan Smith, some peddling going on here OP !