A report published last week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation examined the impacts of international migration on poverty in the UK.
You can read the 42-page report here.
The report examines the available evidence on the how migration impacts on the labour market, the cost of living, public services and public finances.
Its findings indicate that the overall effect of migration on poverty across the UK as a whole is likely to be small.
The key points from the report are as follows:
• Migration may affect poverty in many different ways. However, determining the impacts is difficult because of the complexity of poverty itself, the number of factors that affect it and continuing uncertainty about the size and nature of the impacts that migration has.
• Four key ways in which migration may be expected to affect the incidence of poverty in the UK are through impacts on the labour market, prices and the cost of living, public services and public finances.
• Significant effects of migration on employment rates have not been found. However, migration is likely to have decreased wages slightly in low-wage jobs, at least in the short run. While impacts have generally been found to be small, empirical uncertainties remain.
• Migration appears to reduce the cost of some goods and services, resulting in more affordable prices for low-income, UK-born people. However again, the impacts seem to be relatively small and may not have been measured precisely.
• The fiscal impacts of migration in the UK are estimated to be small (either positive or negative depending on measurement choices), and differ by migrant group. The evidence remains limited when it comes to the fiscal impacts of fine-grained policy changes.
• The overall impacts of migration across public services and across the UK as a whole are likely to be small (whether positive or negative), although impacts in high-migration areas may be more significant. More research and better data are needed to fully understand how migration affects public services.
• Adjusting policies to reflect evidence about the impacts of migration on poverty is a challenge. In addition to the problem of gaps in the evidence, immigration policy (which shapes the numbers, characteristics and rights of migrants in the UK) is inherently difficult to 'fine-tune' with a view to achieving specific social impacts.