ONS statistics regarding employment by country of birth

November 12, 2019

Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said:

The reliance on overseas labour continues. A rise of nearly a quarter of a million non-UK born workers, of whom 157,000 were non-EU and 81,000 EU, is astounding. Worryingly, both the Conservatives and Labour are proposing policies that will likely boost these numbers and in Labour’s case, turbo-charge them. That is senseless.

It’s time politicians gave serious thought to pressing employers to focus more on training our own, raising wages and improving conditions, rather than relying on cheaper, and perhaps more malleable, overseas workers.

Note to editors

• See the ONS statistics, which show that the number of non-UK born workers has increased by 238,000 on the year to the third highest level ever (5.77 million).
• The number of non-EU born workers is at an all-time record high of 3.4 million (having risen by 157,000 over the year) - see ONS graph below.
• The number of EU-born workers rose by 81,000. While there was a rise of 42,000 in EU14-born workers and of 52,000 in EU8-born workers, there was a fall of 15,000 in the number of EU2-born workers.
• By comparison the number of UK-born workers rose by 65,000 during the year.
• See ONS graph below:

Figure 2: The number of non-UK-born people working in the UK has generally increased over the last 20 years

Non-UK-born people (aged 16 years and over) working in the UK, not seasonally adjusted, July to September 1999 to July to September 2019