An unpublished government-wide review has rebuffed repeated claims by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, that Immigration has consigned large numbers of British workers to the dole queue. The potentially explosive report concludes that there is “very little evidence” of such job displacement when the economy is growing. One Whitehall source told The Independent the review found Immigration had a “negligible” impact on British workers.
The overview of all previous research on the highly sensitive issue since 2003 was conducted jointly by the Home Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department of Work and Pensions. It refutes the statistic cited by Mrs May from a 2012 study by the government’s Migration Advisory Committee which showed that “for every additional one hundred migrants, twenty-three British workers would not be employed”.