Today’s papers (with the Daily Mail leading the charge as usual) are again full of lurid tales of how all Britain’s economic woes can be conveniently blamed on those hardy perennials of scapegoating – East European migrant workers. We have responded in the past to this misleading, divisive and pernicious propaganda (see here, here and here) and will not do so now in any detail. Besides, the reasons why these latest figures are so wrong that the British media coverage of this issue would be funny were it not for the fact that youth unemployment in the UK is indeed a very serious problem (albeit not one that can be blamed on East Europeans) is carefully explained by Matt Cavanagh in the New Statesman today. His great piece which systematically takes apart the MigrationWatch figures can be read by clicking here. Ironically, research by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has also shown that immgration from Eastern Europe may well have acted “as an economic stimulus, pushing total employment levels higher and dole claimant numbers lower than they would otherwise have been” (but of course you won’t read that in The Mail or The Sun - whose slant on this issue is simply part of their wider agenda of propping up the Coalition government and campaigning for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union).
Alarmist media coverage of the cost of appeals against refusal of settlement visas, also based on MigrationWatch figures, has also been shown to be innaccurate.
Interestingly, once it emerged that there was more to the truth than the tabloid headlines suggested the papers completely changed tack the following week, this time with banner headlines screaming that, far from “taking our jobs” East European migrants were it seems claiming UK state benefits in their thousands (this story emerging after the government mischieviously and prematurely leaked data to the media). But yet again these headlines targeting East Europeans proved to be the polar opposite of the truth, for as Jonathan Portes pointed out in his excellent response (click here to read in full) “migrants are about half as likely as non-migrants to be claiming out-of-work benefits“.
