26.09.2011: Office for National Statistics: Trends in A8 migration to the UK during the recession – Released: 22 September 2011. Excerpts
Office for National Statistics: Trends in A8 migration to the UK during the recession – Released: 22 September 2011
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/population-trends-rd/population-trends/no–145–autumn-2011/index.html
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Up until mid-2007 temporal trends in A8 migration mirrored those of other immigrants; however since then the number of new migrants from Eastern Europe has declined, whereas inflows of immigrants from elsewhere have not.
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In the Fife survey, 25 per cent of respondents were not registered under the WRS and 13 per cent did not have a NINo. In the Glasgow survey a third of the A8 migrants interviewed were not WRS registered. These results therefore point to the suggestion that WRS data underestimate the scale of East and Central European migration to the country.
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The downward trend in new A8 migrants coming to the UK during the recession, as shown in Figure 1, has been in marked contrast with the rapid rise in numbers during 2004 and 2005, but an interesting feature is that so many migrants continued to enter the UK at a time of rising UK unemployment.
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A growing body of evidence indicates that many migrants accept jobs in the UK that local employers find hard to fill with domestic labour
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Less than one percent of all jobs in the UK are in agriculture, yet up to 40 per cent of all employees in this sector in 2010 might have been A8 workers
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In almost all of the interviews, A8 migrant labour was viewed in positive terms, with these workers being described as having a strong work-ethic and often being compared favourably with domestic labour.
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“Because it is minimum wage work on a factory floor no Scottish people want to do it and the Eastern Europeans are the only ones that will. The locals are not really interested unfortunately because they’d rather be on benefits but our European workers are a great bunch, really hard working and diligent and if we didn’t have them we’d be in real trouble so it gets on my nerves when people complain about migrant workers because this country could not do without them.”
(June, operations director, food processing company, rural Scotland)
“Before the recession in the hospitality sector there were probably more jobs than we had people for so that created the demand for Eastern Europeans to fill those positions. But now those jobs aren’t there and we have got quite a high number of unemployed people in the UK so the demand for bringing in the extra people to fill those jobs is just not there.”
(Gerald, director, labour provider firm, urban Scotland)
“Most of my workers are Eastern Europeans and that is because the locals don’t want to seem to work here, the pay isn’t great and it’s pretty boring work… just before the recession I was worried about getting workers but now I’ve got lots of people coming in or phoning up and looking for a job but again they’re all Eastern Europeans – you never get the locals doing that.”
(Frank, production manager, food processing plant, rural Scotland)