“They Take Our Jobs And Come For Cheap Money”’ (i.e. Benefits) 🪶 More Migration Myths

Barry Gilheany ✍ ‘What we want to do is to bear down on migration, particularly of unskilled workers who have no job to come to.”

The words of former UK prime minister Boris Johnston in a TV interview in December 2019, ahead of the UK’s formal departure from the EU on 1st February 2020 and a few days before his landslide general election victory.[1]

In 2016 Len McCluskey, former general secretary of Unite the Union – the second-largest trade union in the UK claimed that:

The elite’s use of immigration to this country is not motivated by a love of diversity and multiculturalism. It is instead all part of the flexible labour market model, ensuring a plentiful supply of cheap labour here for those jobs that cannot be exported elsewhere.[2]

In 2007, the UK’s Labour Home Secretary, launched a clampdown on ‘foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits’. In 2015, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron called for a ‘wide-scale change to the rules on welfare and benefits. In the USA, Donald Trump has argued ‘illegal immigrants are lower skilled workers with less education’ who ‘draw much more out from the system than they can ever possibly pay back.’[3]

A range of comments from across political and ideological divides that encapsulate the most ill-informed and pernicious views about immigration; in the case of economic migration rather than biggest contributors though Messrs Johnson and Trump have made successful political careers in the deliberate conflation of asylum, “illegal” and “legal” economic migration and freedom of movement within the EU; the latter being arguably the biggest contributory factor to the Leave win in the 2016 EU referendum. These perceptions have created unfortunate realities such as the xenophobic hostility to EU citizens resident in Brexit Britain and Donald Trump’s draconian mass deportation programme in the US enforced by the virtually paramilitary body, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

But behind the vacuous soundbites of “Stop the Boats” and “Smash the Gangs” which are the staples of immigration discourse and policy in the UK is lack of comprehension and discussion as to why global migration has increased so much and how it has affected other countries. There is little or no consideration about the effects of the collision between the two greatest demographic trends on the UK and other countries.

The first is the world-wide explosion of migration, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries and the relative ease of travel. Since 1990, the number of people living outside the country of their birth has doubled to 300 million.[4]

Second, the birthrate in all rich countries, apart from Israel, has fallen well below the replacement rate at which population rates are stable. For the first time in human history there has been a progressive decline in populations that cannot be attributed to war, famine, or disease as triggers. Consequently, more and more countries are reliant on migrant labour to complement shrinking and ageing workforces.[5]

For example, Germany will need annual net migration of close to 300,000 until 2040 to sustain its labour force. In the US, immigrants account for about one in five healthcare workers in the second Trump administration. In Britain, the care sector emerged from lockdown with record vacancies – and a commensurate need for migrant workers.[6]

Wilful Ignorance

For the reality of migration and its dynamics confront Western political elites with an inconvenient truth which contradicts their assertion that their societies do not need lower-skilled workers. In fact, there is a real and consistent demand for migrant labour art all skill levels. Migrant workers are not as ‘unwanted as politicians claim. In reality, immigration is primarily driven by labour demand.[7]

Employers and agencies actively recruit foreign workers, as migrants fill crucial job shortages in vital sectors. This is as true as it was in the days when Enoch Powell (before he claimed that immigration would lead to “Rivers of Blood”) as UK Health Secretary encouraged nurses from the Caribbean and other Commonwealth territories in the 1950s and early 1960s to come to Britain to staff its NHS – a role which by general acclaim they filled beyond expectation. It happens in plain sight in Western societies. For the stark reality is that immigration restrictions that deny the central role of labour demand in driving migration will not stop immigration; in fact, they typically prompt migrant workers to overstay their visas or cross borders illegally.[8]

For both governments and anti-immigration activists on the far right who see mass migration as an existential threat to national identity and call for remigration are in denial about a fundamental truth; that our wealthy, ageing and highly educated societies have developed a built-in structural demand for migrant workers that is impossible to eliminate as long as economies keep growing. From that perspective, the most effective way to reduce immigration is to wreck the economy.[9]

In relation to the latter scenario, some anti-immigration activists will admit to a preference for gradual economic decline over solving the problem of declining populations through migration. At the time of the Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage publicly mused that a drop in GDP would be a price worth paying for the recovery of UK ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ from Brussels and, when confronted by the four per cent drop in UK economic output since “Independence Day”, will double down and say that it has not been a ‘proper Brexit’ in the manner of certain Marxists’ pursuit of ‘true communism’ or the quest of some Irish Republican purists for the true ‘Republic’.

But while voters may fret about immigration, this does not mean that they won’t blame their government for rises in the costs of everyday living or if there is no one to care for their ageing parents. Japan provides a case study in the interplay and outcome of these tensions. There has been a drop in its population in every year since 2009 and there has been a collapse in the country’s birthrate. Fewer than 700,000 babies were born there last year, the lowest figure since 1899, and down from a mid-1970s peak of 2.5 million. But historically, it has had very low levels of immigration, and its ethnic homogeneity has attracted plaudits from the western radical right. However demographic changes have impacted on this purity. In each of the last three years, the number of foreign residents increased by about 10% to reach a record 3.8 million. Most are from poorer Asian countries and on work visas, filling holes left by the decreasing population.[10]

Although these numbers are much lower than those for the US and western European countries and very few of them are asylum seekers, there has been a backlash to this increase in foreigners in the form of an electoral breakthrough for the far right Sanseito party with its “Japanese First” slogan; increasing its tally of seats from one to 14 in recent elections to Japan’s upper house.[11]

Not Doing As They Say

In defiance of their own anti-immigration rhetoric, politicians often acquiesce to employers’ lobbying by allowing more migrant workers in or by tolerating the employment of undocumented migrants. The reality that this immigration is more encouraged than it seems is further highlighted by the central role that the recruitment of officially ‘unwanted’ foreign workers has continued to play in facilitating migration and the tapping of new labour sources.[12]

Compared to the post-Second World War decades, when major migrations – from Mexico to the US, from Mediterranean countries to western Europe, and from the Caribbean and South Asia to the UK were put into motion through concerted efforts to recruit workers (a la Enoch Powell and West Indian nurses), governments are now less directly involved and thus less visible in the recruitment process. This is part of a more general shift towards economic liberalisation and deregulation, as well as the rise of ‘flexible work,’ giving increased leeway to private sector operators to recruit and hire local workers and migrant workers alike.[13]

Nowadays, staffing firms such as Randstad, Manpower and Adecco are involved in the recruitment of foreign workers. In the Netherlands alone, there were no fewer than 4,830 official employment agencies in 2021, helping to recruit East European workers for the Dutch horticultural, warehousing and distribution sectors. In 2022, the US had around 25,000 registered staffing and recruitment agencies, and the UK had 20.096 employment placement agencies. While private agencies do most of the actual recruitment, governments satisfy employers’ needs by allowing legal labour migration and turning a blind eye towards the illegal deployment of migrant workers; all out of the view of the public.[14]

Because of the sensitivity and toxicity of the migration issue, such programmes usually abjure any mention of the M-word. ‘Au pair’ and ‘trainee’ are well-known euphemisms for migrant workers. The au pair programmes run by many Western governments recruit domestic and care workers, who often end up staying longer than their initial visas allow and whose presence is widely tolerated as it is common knowledge that their labour fulfils essential economic and social functions. Even South Korea and Japan, long resistant to the idea of admitting foreign workers, have capitulated to pressures to admit workers from countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Nepal.[15]

So, Western politicians try to reconcile their desire for GDP growth with rhetorical acknowledgment of public discontent with rising migration levels by tacitly encouraging economic migration, while making hay about irregular (often and inaccurately called illegal) immigration by refugees. There have been some attempts to tighten up routes for legal migration at the margins: in the UK, most international students are no longer allowed to bring dependents, and the salary required to acquire a visa has gone up (though not NHS workers). But net migration is still expected to be about 200,000 to 300,000 for the foreseeable future – well above historic levels.[16]

Even countries with radical right governments are trying the same strategy. In Italy, Giorgina Meloni has pushed EU colleagues to go further on reducing irregular migration, while quietly pushing through two increases in the number of visas available for non-EU workers (alongside already high levels of migration from eastern Europe). In the UK, in a welcome introduction to the incompatibility of dog whistle, xenophobic anti-migrant rhetoric with effective local governance, the new Reform controlled Kent County Council wrote to the Home Secretary in July complaining that new rules preventing care homes from hiring from abroad would “leave providers on a cliff edge.”[17]

Another common migration myth – that immigration undermines the welfare state – does not survive any contact with the reality of the extent to which migrant workers play in upholding affordable welfare provisions, not just indirectly through the taxes they pay, but also more directly through the work they do. Across the Western world, immigrants have increasingly buttressed care systems that suffer from a chronic lack of availability of locally trained staff.[18]

It is now a truism that the UK NHS could not survive without the immigration of foreign doctors and nurses. In 2022, 33 per cent of all doctors working for the NHS were foreign born, up from 26 per cent in 2012. Between 2017 and 2022, the share of newly hired NHS nurses with non-UK nationalities rose from 20 to 45 per cent, the vast majority from outside the EU. Half of all foreign-born NHS nurses are from either India or the Philippines, and two-thirds of foreign-born doctors are either Indian or Pakistani, while the number of health professionals from African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt is increasing fast. About 29 per cent of GPs in England earned their degree abroad. Of this share, 54 per cent qualified in Asia, 28 per cent in Africa and 18 per cent in the EU.[19]

Migration policies in Western countries, whether they concern asylum or the rights and availability of migrant labour, remain mired in institutional paradox, if not hypocrisy. This is especially the case with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitudes governments have taken in relation to the employment of undocumented migrants. To give practical effect to populist soundbites such as “British jobs for British workers” would most likely mean the promotion of pronatalist family policies associated with right-wing nationalist governments like Viktor Orban’s Hungary to reverse populist decline and/or coercive measures to force natives to take the jobs that migrants take; the dirty and drudge jobs that the former traditionally refuse to do. While both excite right-wing opinion, they are not compatible with the values of liberal democracy and open societies. And so, real debates and solutions will continue to be delayed and deferred.

References

[1] Hein de Haas (2023) How Migration Really Works. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Viking p.109

[2] Ibid, p.130

[3] Ibid, pp.145-46

[4] Sam Freedman The truth about migrant workers: demonised but in demand, and few of us can live without them. The Observer. 3 August 2025 pp.12-13

[5] Ibid p.12

[6] Ibid, p.12

[7] De Hass, p125

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] The Observer. 3 August 2025, p.12

[11] Ibid

[12] De Haas, p.122

[13] Ibid, p.123

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] The Observer. 3 August 2025 p.13

[17] Ibid

[18] De Haas, pp.157-58

[19] Ibid, p.158

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.