Hamish McRae: All these people have come here to work. So how have they found enough jobs?

The UK has become the greatest job machine in the European time zone

Some 600,000 people from the new EU member states have moved to the UK over the past two years. It is astounding - the largest-ever inward migration to the UK and the largest relative to the size of the population since the Huguenots came after the revocation of the Edit of Nantes in 1685. That influx of talented French, incidently, was a huge economic asset to the UK.

But now consider something even more astounding. Those 600,000 people have found jobs. Sure, there has been some rise in unemployment, more of which in a moment. But while people from the new member states have access to our labour market, they don't have access to unemployment benefits. They have not come to scrounge; they have come to work.

Yet virtually all the comment about the arrival of these migrants has been about the detail. Much has been positive: the quality and skills of the immigrants and the easy way in which they have been absorbed into British society. Some has been negative: there have been claims that they have depressed the wages of less-skilled Britons and that the rise in unemployment has been the result of this influx. This debate is heating up as the further enlargement of the EU, to take in Romania and Bulgaria, looms.

By contrast, there has been hardly any comment about the extraordinary ability of the British economy to provide the people from the new EU states with jobs. It is not just immigrants, for it is also pulling older people back into work. There are 29 million people in work here: the UK has become the greatest job machine in the entire European time zone.

We assume this is normal - of course there are lots of jobs that need to get done here, for employers are crying out for good people - but in most other parts of the world, and in any other part of Europe, bar Ireland, it is abnormal. Even here, 15 years ago, when we had nearly 10 per cent unemployment, it would have been unthinkable the UK could have created so many jobs so swiftly. So something strange and important is happening. It is a story that has several elements, mostly positive, but with some worrying twists.

The starting point is that all this job growth has been in services. By contrast, there has been a steady reduction in the numbers of people working in manufacturing. Service industries respond much more quickly to changes in demand. It takes, perhaps, three years to plan and build a manufacturing plant, and it is designed to be run with a particular number of workers. By contrast, an estate agency can take on more people in a matter of weeks, maybe days. So more growth feeds quickly through to more employment.

Secondly, the UK job machine has been driven by the buoyancy of the economy of London and the South-east, and particularly by the financial services industry. As anyone reading the papers in the past few days will have noticed, bonuses are soaring, with the average bonus some £25,000 and some in the £1m-plus league. I have never known a company that pays its staff more than it has to, so I think you can assume that the output of these people is high too. That money has to go somewhere, and after people have bought the goods they choose, much of the cash goes on buying labour-intensive services. That is how the wealth disperses.

A simple example, and one that has relevance not just for the high-earners: there was a report from the Office for National Statistics last week that showed that for the first time Britons spend more on eating out than on eating in. The result is not just more money for the celebrity chefs, but more jobs for waiters and kitchen staff.

Provided the money machine continues humming, the job machine will continue too.

But are these "good" jobs? Some clearly are. The Work Foundation has just cited hairdressers, celebrities, managers and consultants as the "iconic" jobs of the 21st century, "jobs that capture the spirit of the age, workers who between them speak for the nature of their times". That organisation was itself until recently known as The Industrial Society, so you can see where it is coming from, but there is not an industrial job among its pick of the pack.

And some of these jobs clearly are not very "good" in the sense that they offer little security and status, and as the pay survey reported in Monday's Independent demonstrated, not very high wages either.

So while we should celebrate the fact that the UK economy is successful at creating jobs - in round numbers some 250,000 a year - it is also an economy where pay inequality is rising. We need to think about the reasons for that, and what might be done to spread the wealth.

Now this has been discussed quite a lot but again the discussion has been a pretty narrow one: it is "what can we do in tax and spending policies to combat inequality?" The wider way of looking at the phenomenon would be to look at the supply and demand for the very highly skilled people who command such high incomes and the supply and demand for the less skilled too.

Part of the reason for the top-end service industry boom has been the way in which the UK has become a magnet for global talent. Quite a lot of those "iconic" jobs are filled by foreigners, from managing Arsenal to running our biggest companies, nearly one-third of which have non-nationals in the chair or as chief executive. There is a global shortage for people with these talents and they earn top global rates.

The disturbing aspect of our great job machine is what is happening at the other end of the scale. Why is it that employers would evidently rather take on the new migrants from, say, Poland, than the equivalent young Britons? We don't have as bad a youth unemployment problem as France or Italy but we do have a problem none the less.

From anecdotal evidence, it seems the key differences among the new migrants are of skills and attitude: they really want to do the job right. Now you would expect that: people who travel to a foreign country for a job are a self-selected bunch of highly motivated workers. But, obviously, we need to look carefully at what we are teaching our own young people, particularly in the "soft" skills that the new service industries demand.

We have a huge amount to learn. We need a much better understanding of how we have stumbled on creating this job machine. We need to be aware that it has a strong regional bias towards the south and east of the country and think about what can be done to expand the pockets of job strength elsewhere in places such as Edinburgh and Leeds. (Did you know Scotland is a significant net importer of people for the first time for more than 50 years?) And we need to think about training.

But let's also celebrate what is happening. It is vastly better than a situation where there was no job growth and ambitious Britons went abroad to find work.