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UK
immigrants get fair share in labour pool
WSN
Network
London: Immigrant workers have been squeezing thousands of Britons
out of the workplace every year, an inference that can be drawn from
statistics released by the British government. In the past five
years, the immigrant workforce has grown by almost a million while
the number of native-born workers has plummeted by half a million.
The latest bombshell from the treasury came after a week of chaos
over immigration figures, in which ministers had to admit that the
impact of mass immigration has been far more dramatic than
previously acknowledged. The treasury has published the figures in
the annual ONS Labour Force Survey which monitors trends among
Britain’s workers. In the 10 years since the Labour Party came to
power it shows that more than 80% of new jobs have gone to foreign
workers—a far higher proportion than ministers had admitted last
week.
Since 1997, the number of adults engaged in work has risen by 1.7
million, of with 1.35 million are immigrants. In the same period,
only 310,000 native-born Britons joined the labour pool. Workforce
figures for the last five years show a steeper decline in the
participation of Britons. Since 2002, Britain’s workforce has grown
by 491,000 to 27.2 million. But the number of British-born workers
fell by 478,000, dipping below 24 million. Over the same period, the
number of immigrants increased by 964,000 to nearly 3.3 million — up
42% per cent.
7 November, 2007
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