If we really want a high-wage, high-skill economy, it’s time to go back to the future
Employers use migrants to try to drive down wages. The reasons for low pay and productivity in Britain have little to do with immigration. The best way to prevent employers exploiting migrants is not by restricting immigration.
These three claims may seem contradictory. They do so only because our ways of thinking have become so polarised, by Brexit among other issues, that we often find it difficult to view issues in the round. So, in the current debate about labour shortages and the need for a “high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity” economy, immigration has become either the solution or the problem. On the one side, there’s a tendency to argue that employers don’t try to use immigration to cheapen labour costs; on the other, in Boris Johnson’s words, that “low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity” are the product of “uncontrolled immigration”. Neither is true.
