Brexit “modestly” raised the number of foreign-born workers in Britain, according to new research.
It says that many forecasts before Brexit, including those by the Office for Budget Responsibility and UK Home Office, predicted that Brexit would reduce immigration and foreign-born employment in Britain, curbing Gross Domestic Product and tax revenues.
After the Boris Johnson government in the UK implemented a new regime, which liberalized the visa regime for non-EU workers, net migration rose to a peak of over 900,000 in 2023, and Sir Keir Starmer accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment”.
The reality is more nuanced, according to new research by Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College London and UK in a Changing Europe, and John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, a Brussels-based think tank.
They estimated the impact of the end of free movement on the number of EU-born workers in Britain, and the new immigration system on workers born in the rest of the world.
The found that, in 2024, Brexit had reduced EU-born workers by about 785,000, or 2.3 per cent of the labour force.
The new migration regime raised non-EU born workers by about 992,000, or 2.95 per cent of the labour force.
The net impact, combining the two estimates together, was a modest rise of about 207,000 foreign-born workers in the UK in 2024 – 0.6 per cent of the labour force.
The study’s authors compared HMRC data on foreign-born employees to EU-15 and European Economic Area countries whose trends in foreign-born employment most closely matched the UK’s in the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, and the implementation of the new immigration regime in 2021.
Their method is similar to ‘doppelgänger’ studies estimating the impact of Brexit on GDP.
Commenting, John Springford said: “Brexit has made only a modest difference to the number of foreign-born people in work in the UK.
“Leaving the EU has not resolved the dilemma facing all European governments – between maintaining employment as societies age and political pressure to reduce immigration.”
Jonathan Portes added: “The post-Brexit immigration policy regime did not lead to the drastic falls in immigration some predicted. But neither was it an “open borders experiment.”
“So while there has indeed been a radical change in the composition of migrant inflows, much of the current political debate exaggerates the overall impact.”
