Professor Gwilym Pryce from the University of Sheffield together with Professor Bernard Fingleton from the University of Cambridge and Dr Dan Olner from the University of Sheffield have have published an article titled Immigration: there is a gaping hole in the debate over how it affects everyone’s job prospects in The Conversation.
The authors developed a method for estimating the local employment impacts of immigration. While previous UK studies have only been able to produce national estimates, Prof Pryce and colleagues have successfully demonstrated the feasibility of the model by applying it to London.
In London they found that no migrant group had a statistically significant long-term negative effect on employment. EU migrants – the main source of controversy underlying Brexit – significantly boosted employment rates in London. These findings have important implications for post-Brexit immigration policy. A second, more wide-reaching implication of this research is that it opens up the possibility of identifying regional variations in how immigration affects jobs. It may finally be able to confirm whether or not the concerns about immigration in some of the poorest areas of the UK have any basis in fact.
The peer reviewed academic article on which the blog is based is published in the journal Urban Studies: Estimating the local employment impacts of immigration: A dynamic spatial panel model