Immigration facts and figures

As promised, here’s the full story of those immigration statistics that I obtained from the ONS. In our new e-world, I can pass on all the results  to you – and they’re worth discussing. The figures show the extent to  which Brown’s “boom” was a mirage built not just on debt, but foreign labour. Most seriously, we can see a deep dysfunctionality in the UK labour market. Our system keeps millions on benefits (never less than  5 million have been on some kind of benefits since 1997) while meeting the needs of expanding the economy with a limitless supply of industrious immigrant labour. This means that the direct link between a growing economy and combating poverty is broken – and this is a serious development that demands attention.

The ONS results are here, in a pdf*. The key finding: there are fewer British-born workers in the first quarter of 2009 than Q1 of 1997.