Did the Early A8 In-migrants to England go to Areas of Labour Shortage?

Abstract

This paper analyses the local incidence across England of migration flows from the eight Accession (A8) countries of east and central Europe immediately following the 2004 expansion of the European Union. It examines not only the total inflow of A8 migrants but also the three largest nationality groups, as well as three large groups defined by the type of job they gained. The distributions of these migrant groups are related to labour market conditions to see how far migrants were attracted to areas with tight labour supply. Migrant group distributions are modelled to take into account other potential drivers such as the patterns of earlier migrant populations. Datasets on the A8 migrants have limitations, and these are noted because policy development may be hindered as a result.

Notes

¹ It should, of course, not be presumed that all migrants are entirely free to choose their destination: for many there is the key role of recruitment agencies (Dench et al., 2006)–gang-masters in some sectors–who are channelling inflows of workers.

² The dataset includes the postcode of either registered place of work or of the agency that workers are registered with, as well as information about the country of citizenship and the type of work. Self-employed migrants are not covered.

³ No two variables in the following model are correlated at as high a level as this.

⁴ There is no consensus on the measurement of housing affordability; we use the values provided by Wilcox (2006).

⁵ Note that the Job Title and Job Description fields in the WRS data were not coded to any standard classification system, so it was necessary to create a set of job types suitable for the analyses here. Although these job types were specifically designed as groupings of the available WRS codings, the grouping process was limited by the questionable quality of some of the coding. For example, linking the Job Title and Job Description codings produced combinations such as ‘Barrister–waiter’ (when the former should presumably be ‘barista’).