Immigration policy fails the billion test


Here's a statistic to make you think. Over the next 20 years, the world's working age population will rise by more than a billion.

In the US, there is already a one million shortfall in nurses, while in the UK, something like half the National Health Service workforce is due to retire in the next 10 years. Photo: MARTIN POPE
Jeremy Warner
By Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor 6:05AM BST 14 Apr 2011

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That makes our own debate here in the UK over whether private businesses can compensate for the 400,000 jobs expected to be lost in the public sector seem not just sterile – Wednesday's relatively encouraging employment data suggests they'll comfortably accommodate the losses – but somewhat trivial too.

The more important question is whether economies are even remotely capable of creating the jobs required to absorb these dramatic increases in the size of the workforce. If they are not, then we can expect major social and political upheaval. Our present set of economic challenges, already difficult enough, will seem like a stroll in the park by comparison.

Even in the UK, which has nowhere near the same demographic bulge in the workforce that confronts many developing countries, longer working lives to make up for inadequate pensions will drive quite significant increases in the size of the workforce. The end of mandatory retirement ages will make it harder still for the young to displace the old. Already shocking levels of youth unemployment in advanced economies threaten to become even worse.

According to Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, we shouldn't allow ourselves to become unduly worried by such looming challenges. Human beings are a clever and inventive lot, and throughout history they have found ways of coping with the seemingly impossible. If something has to be accommodated, then somehow it will be.

Yet it would be well not to rely on such a Panglossian view of the world, and instead prepare for the worst. What's going to drive the increasingly global labour markets of the future, and how should the UK and other advanced economies respond?


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