Can we really trust the economists on EU immigration?

A recent Coffee House blog quite rightly noted that many British people are concerned that high levels of immigration have hurt their jobs, wages and quality of life, and noted too that this anxiety is understandable as workers have had a rough ride in recent times. Yet the authors, self-styled data-crunchers from the LSE, say that ‘the bottom line is that EU immigration has not significantly harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons’.

One might think that the lack of harm, let alone significant harm, is a poor argument for anything. On pay, real wages are little different from a decade ago. The counterfactual — which surely is not beyond the capabilities of the professorial economists — is where wages might be now if over that time we had not seen an increase of 2.5 million in the number of workers from abroad, more than half of whom have come from the EU.