My name is Stanley Siebert, I’ve been a Professor of Labour Economics here at the
University of Birmingham for more years than I care to remember and so I’m going to be
talking about the labour market and in particular, about migration as we go into this election.
What should our position be with regard to this vexed migration issue?
Now, most people who voted to Leave were worried about two things.
They were worried about the issue of control from Brussels and they were also worried about
the issue of migration and so I’m going to look at the second of those things at the
moment.
Now taking the economic point of view for a second, migration has benefits and costs.
Let’s look at those benefits.
First of all, the benefits are universal in the sense that if poor people leave the south
– Africa, China perhaps – and come to the north, in Britain, they’ll make themselves
better off because there’ll be extra jobs for them here, much higher paid.
And they’ll make the people at home better off.
Perhaps that’s harder to imagine but as people leave Africa and China, so the incomes
of those left behind will eventually rise because in a sense there are too many people
in the south and not enough in the north and if you go through this rhyme and reason, migration
helps both those in the south, eventually.
I say eventually because there will be a transition period when all the young people aren’t
there and you can imagine the difficulties in Africa.
But eventually those people in the south will benefit and of course the migrants will benefit.
That’s the good side.
On the other hand there is a bad side of migration and you can see the people who compete with
the migrants will suffer.
In general, if we have free migration, it’s been calculated that wages will eventually
equalise in the north and the south over a long period of time through this mechanism
that I’ve described, but it will require the movement of five billion people to equalise
incomes and everyone will be better off, on average, when this happens.
But if you think of five billion people moving, you can see the sort of dislocation that will
occur.
Now it’s this sort of dislocation which has caused people in Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and Britain, to begin to scratch their heads and worry about the migration because
the fact that we speak English is a great attracter.
Now, I have a clipping from a few years ago from one of the newspapers which said that
ministers ‘must let in more migrants because if they don’t, food prices will rise by
15%’.
So migration into this country is keeping wages down for the unskilled.
If we look at this clipping, which is from the Migration Advisory Committee, the best
source, it says that ‘about a third of Britain’s 70,000 seasonal farm jobs are filled by Romanians
and Bulgarians’.
This was three years ago and it’s predicted that they will move to less arduous roles
when they win full EU rights in 2014.
So there’s going to be a severe labour shortage which will push up wages and prices, but of
course we want wages to be higher The reason that seasonal farm labour is paid so badly
is because of migration.
The reason that nurses are paid badly is because we have so many nurses from Africa for example.
Every nurse trained in Malawi was taken last year.
Now we want higher wages for everyone but particularly for those at the bottom and migrants
are preventing those wages from rising.
Of course food prices will rise and you might say that that’s a bad thing but they will
rise because you’re paying the workers to pick the fruit which a worker needs to be
paid what the job is worth.
So there’s no point in complaining about high food prices because that is what it costs
to make the food.
Have a heart.
Now, when we think about it, about 300,000 people arrived in Britain last year on net.
Now, there are disputes about these figures.
They include students which is silly, but it’s a high figure.
Twenty years ago when Blair came to power there was about 10,000.
Now clearly we can’t have 300,000 people coming here on net every year indefinitely.
We’ll be submerged in houses, we’ll be submerged in roads, in sewerage plants, our
schools will be dislocated – they already are.
So my advice to Mrs May is keep it up, keep up the pressure, we have to reduce the amount
of migration.
The English language is a great attracter.
Whenever I see a crisis in the world, in Africa, in Syria, I think oh well, they’ll soon
be coming here because we have the jobs and of course we have the stable environment,
we’re one of the nicest places in the world, but it can’t go on.