Right to reply: Why do so many “new jobs” go to foreigners?

On Monday, we published a post on George Osborne’s “jobless recovery” — the point being that 90 per cent of the recent rise in employment can be accounted for by foreign nationals. Here’s a counterpunch to it from the IPPR’s Matt Cavanagh, who should already be familiar to CoffeeHousers from his previous posts and articles for us on matters military. We’re hoping that this will be the first of a new series of “Right to reply” posts, giving outside writers the opportunity to take on your loyal baristas in mortal combat. Here goes:

One of the most frequently recycled statistics of recent years is the percentage of “new jobs going to foreigners”. The first thing to say is that this is a bad way to phrase it. When newspapers like today’s Mail and Sun talk about “nine out of ten new jobs going to foreigners” that gives false despair to the average British-born jobseeker, making them believe there is only a one-in-ten chance of a British-born person getting any given job — when, in fact, the chances are the other way around.