Against the grain: Do migrant workers lower wages? No

Nigel Harris is Emeritus Professor of the economics of the City at UCL and chairman of the RSA Migration Commission. He argues that immigration controls in the UK should be abolished.

Immigration controls have failed. First, they do not meet the actual labour demand, as can be seen by illegal immigration. Second, they are terribly abusive for migrants. And third, they strip the Third World of its scarcest skills. Governments cannot control movement; all they are doing is creating a structure of problems that are horrifying.

I'm not talking about people settling. The debate about immigration is about settlement, but settlement is irrelevant. What we need is circulation; people free to come and go as they have for thousands of years.

Why don't we ask for controls on movements from Glasgow to London? We know that if Glasgow kids come to London to get work, they find work or they leave. We know it's not a problem. Really, what people care about is foreigners migrating. There's a sense that they are foreigners and should be kept out.

Britain is no longer self-sufficient in workers, so we need foreign-born workers. The native labour force is not producing either the numbers or the composition of skills to support the economy, therefore the welfare of households in Britain turns on the capacity of the government to recruit labour from abroad.

Population ageing is going to make this very much worse, as an older population requires many relatively low-skilled people to work as carers. This issue is not about the numbers of people entering the country, but about how we run the economy and caring for the aged.

Would foreign-born workers come to live off social security? No. Migrant workers do not claim social security, and refugees only claim social security because the British government forbids them to work.

Do migrant workers lower wages? No. Foreign-born and native-born workers are not, in most cases, in competition. In fact, the availability of foreign-born workers lifts the whole economy and provides employment for the native-born.

With the influx of migrant workers from Eastern Europe since 2004, we have never seen such low unemployment. Without those workers a lot of sectors would have shut down, or native-born workers would have to be laid off, because there wouldn't have been support workers.

And this is not just about Britain, it's a global issue. If migrant labourers came over for a few years and we could enhance their skills while they are here, it would do more for the Third World and the reduction of poverty than anything else.

The RSA Migration Commission report can be read online at www.migrationcommission.org