Creating an impression

Is Dr John Reid pandering to The Daily Mail? Alf Young in The Herald provides some useful statistical analysis:

"His own government, through the department for work and pensions, produces regularly updated statistics on the number of national insurance numbers allocated to overseas nationals entering the UK. The latest series was published only last month. It does show that something approaching 700,000 migrant workers (662,400 to be precise) were allocated NI numbers in 2005/06.

But they came from all over the world. Only 270,000 of them were from the eight EU accession countries, including 171,000 from Poland. Over the past four years, despite the Mail's fallacious claim, the number of workers from eastern Europe allocated NI numbers comes to 412,000. And according to recent research commissioned by the Home Office itself, many employers in low-skilled sectors such as agriculture, hotels and catering and parts of business services believe their businesses "would suffer or could not survive without migrant labour". Many of the jobs simply don't attract home-grown takers.

In this study, employers praised migrant workers for their motivation, reliability, flexibility and work ethic. And in the Home Office's own accession monitoring report, which tracks all those registering under the UK's worker registration scheme, most workers from eastern Europe are described as "young and single". Eighty two per cent are aged between 18 and 34. Ninety five percent have no dependants living with them. They produced only 1700 applications for income related benefits, child benefit, tax credits and housing support in the year to June 2005. And only 50 of those were allowed to proceed to further consideration.

So where are these hordes of greedy migrants from eastern Europe, stealing British jobs and putting unsupportable stresses on our public services? For all economic migrants coming to the UK, the proportion on out-of-work benefits has fallen from 11% in 2000/01 to just 3% in 2004/05. Home Office ministers should start reading their own research evidence.

Remember this the next time you read about how the hordes of East European immigrants are swamping Britain's public services.