How many skilled migrants take unskilled jobs?

Later today, Home Secretary Theresa May will announce details of the Government's proposed cap on immigration.

One of the frequently raised issues concerning the cap is the potentially damaging impact it could have on the science and business communities by limiting the amount of expertise brought in from outside the European Union.

Critics of the policy argue that limiting the amount of highly-skilled workers who come to the UK under the Tier 1 section of the current points-based system would ultimately harm the economy.

Ministers, while by no means dismissing such concerns, have argued that there is evidence that tougher restrictions on these high-skilled workers would not necessarily have the destructive consequences implied.

Key to this argument is a study published last month by the UK Border Agency that suggested, rather than bursting at the seams, there was potentially spare capacity in Tier 1.

The study suggested that of these high-skilled workers, nearly a third of them ended up in low-skilled work, or even unemployed.

With such a proportion not going to the jobs where it is claimed foreign workers are needed, the cap may not necessarily be ill-fitting on account of being too tight.

In addition to widespread media coverage, the study has been frequently cited by ministers, including the Prime Minister in the debate leading up to today's announcement.

As Immigration Minister Damian Green said of the findings: "'We have discovered that of the visas we issued last year 29 per cent are doing unskilled jobs".

It seems more than likely that it will be referenced again in this afternoon's debate.

But is it such a clear-cut study? There are several points which show that study cannot offer the certainty that ministers have implied.

Firstly, of the 29 per cent or 346 Tier 1 migrants in unskilled work, 44 per cent of these were recent graduates of UK universities granted permission to stay on to find work as Tier 1 migrants.

Given the difficulty graduates are having finding jobs, that recent graduates would be in unskilled work or unemployed is hardly surprising.

This also challenges the portrayal of the study's findings as highly skilled "brain surgeon" immigrants coming to the UK to take low-skilled work.

Secondly, because the data was recorded when dependants of these Tier 1 migrant applied to join this person in the UK, the work does not examine the status of anyone without dependants and thus is hardly a representative sample.

Even then, there was no requirement on dependants to give this information when they applied. Indeed the lack of responses meant that the study was forced to class 46 per cent of the 1,184 responses as unclear.

This means even in this unrepresentative sample only 642 responses were analysed. This is out of a total of over 18,000 Tier 1 visas issued during the period looked at — undermining portrayals of the findings as 29 per cent of all Tier 1 visas issued.

While of the records the study did analyse, 29 per cent, or 346 workers were in unskilled work, as opposed to 25 per cent being in skilled work, the gaps leave questions over the conclusions that can be drawn from the study.

Perhaps this is why this more recent research stresses that its conclusions are "indicative rather than definitive".

These gaps also raise a further problem with using the study to claim that a third of highly skilled migrants go into unskilled work.

The research references previous work done by the UKBA on a pilot of the points-based system, which surveyed 1,286 Tier 1 migrants. With only 2.4 per cent of responses providing insufficient details, this earlier survey found a much higher proportion of migrants in skilled work than the 25 per cent suggested by last month's publication.

Though no number is given in the earlier work for the proportion of Tier 1 migrants going into skilled work, further analysis of the pilot-phase figures suggested 70 per cent became employed in such jobs.

With 10 per cent of respondents unemployed this left 20 per cent of migrants working in unskilled jobs — markedly lower than the 29 per cent figure used recently by the Immigration Minister.

The second study does group unskilled and unemployed together in its findings suggesting there is after all not that much contradiction between the two sets of findings.

So it is possible that if higher quality research was undertaken now the scheme was undertaken now the scheme is underway it might bear out what the Government has been saying. But the current research is certainly not robust enough for that.

Conclusion

Since the study was published it has been frequently referenced in the debate over the migration cap.

It has been cited by ministers in Commons debate, and as recently as yesterday was referenced in the Daily Mail.

Yet it seems that the report does not simply provide strong enough research to stand up the definitive way in which it has been portrayed.

All the caveats to the analysis are provided in the UKBA publication, so the report is not itself misleading, though it is hardly impressive.

However, when used by politicians or the press as a snappy statistic to stand up an argument, the findings are stretched too far. The soundbites ministers have offered are not justified by the research they cite.

We see no reason why it would not have been better to wait until better information was available before ministers began quoting statistics on the operation of the system.

So Full Fact will be watching to see if the figures make an appearance this afternoon.

Patrick Casey