Common opinion sees migrants as main cause for reduced lower wages and affordable housing. So, why researches and statistics tell us another story?
By Juan Camilo
London is a city with huge support services and retail sectors that are essential for economic success on a day to day basis. In the low paid jobs that are essential to support individuals, businesses and infrastructure, migrant workers today often make up a majority of the workforce. Most migrants in these sectors find their jobs difficult and live austere lives but find living in London a rewarding experience. For some, London will be a temporary stay. Others plan to settle down, conscious that despite the harshness of their jobs they have more opportunities here than back home.
The reality is that London depends on migrants to carry out most of the lowest-paid and most insecure jobs that offer few prospects of career progression, such as cleaning, catering and care work, and which are dominated by employment agencies. Recent research www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/globalcities has shown that almost all the workforce in these sectors is made up of migrant workers, many of them recent migrants. The companies that employ them argue that they are not favouring migrants when recruiting, but that in the environment they work in, where companies compete against each others for contracts on the basis of the lowest priced tenders, only migrants apply for the jobs in offer. Migrant workers are therefore a key part of the workforce, performing many of the low paid service jobs available in London.
Those who oppose immigration generally point to the impact of migration on employment levels, wages, social housing and public services. All of these are areas where evidently there are strains in London. However, in all of these areas research has shown that either immigration does not have a negative impact or that other factors do. For example, in terms of employment, migrants in London in the past fifteen years have mostly occupied new jobs rather than displacing settled workers. While there is evidence that immigration has lowered wages in many of the low paid jobs in London, the main pressure on wages has come from outsourcing services by contracting them out, with companies competing for contracts on the basis of lower prices which are achieved by lowering wages. Statistics also show that most recent migrants are housed in the private rented sector and that the long waiting lists for social housing are more easily explained by the decrease in the stock of council housing over the past 30 years, both in absolute and in relative terms. Since the 1980s and until 2005 more social housing left the market through right to buy policies than new ones coming in through construction of social housing. Finally, public services can become strained by upsurges in demand. Migrants make higher fiscal contributions than British-born residents and that should be reflected in the budgets of public service delivery agencies. Nevertheless, the allocation of funding based on population estimates is deeply flawed with public services in areas with high population turnover receiving less funding than they should.
Migrants in London are spread through its diverse economic sectors contributing to the city’s economy across the board, but it is certain sectors at the bottom end of the labour market which have become almost totally dependent on migrant labour. The structural problems in London’s labour and housing markets affect migrants in low paid jobs just as much as settled Londoners. That is why migrants are often active in campaigning for better wages and employment conditions at the bottom end of the labour market, an issue that would benefit everybody in these types of jobs, irrespective of whether they are British born, long-time residents or recent arrivals.
Low paid workers in London need secure jobs that pay a living wage as well as affordable housing. Such aims would not only benefit migrant workers currently doing jobs in precarious conditions but would be an incentive for currently inactive settled residents to return to employment. On the other hand, imposing further restrictions on migrants would leave the structural problems of low pay and lack of affordable housing unresolved, while at the same time increasing the vulnerability of migrant workers.
