YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT LINK QUESTIONED WITH IMMIGRATION

The link between immigration from Eastern Europe and youth unemployment was questioned in a report by campaigners today.

The number of migrants working in the UK who were born in Eastern Europe rose by 600,000 since the so-called A8 countries joined the EU in May 2004, while youth unemployment rose by almost 450,000 in the same period, Migration Watch UK said.

Sir Andrew Green, the campaign group's chairman, said it would be "a very remarkable coincidence if there was no link at all between them".

Sir Andrew Green - blames immigration for higher youth unemployment

Migrants from the A8 countries - Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - "have tended to be disproportionately young, well-educated, prepared to work for low wages and imbued with a strong work ethic", he said.

Youth unemployment in the UK increased from 575,000 in the first quarter of 2004 to 1,016,000 in the third quarter of 2011, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.

Over the same period, the number of workers from the A8 grew by 600,000.

Sir Andrew conceded that measuring any impact of immigration on youth unemployment was "not an exact science".

He said: "Correlation is not, of course, proof of causation but, given the positive employability characteristics and relative youth of migrants from these countries, it is implausible and counter-intuitive to conclude - as the previous Government and some economists have done - that A8 migration has had virtually no impact on UK youth unemployment in this period.

"We hear a great deal from employers about the value of immigrant labour, especially from Eastern Europe, but there are also costs some of which have undoubtedly fallen on young British born workers."

A Home Office spokesman said: "This Government is working to reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands, levels we last saw in the 1990s.

"Controlled migration can bring benefits to the UK economy, but uncontrolled immigration can put pressure on public services, infrastructure and community relations.

"That is why we are ensuring graduates and the workforce get the opportunities and skills they need so that they can find work, and why we have maintained restrictions on workers from Romania and Bulgaria, and made it clear we will always introduce transitional controls on new European Union member states to stop unregulated access to British jobs."

Danny Sriskandarajah, director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme he was sceptical about the impact immigration had had on the youth unemployment figures.

And he said: "The challenge here is to skill up young people to get them into the jobs they want to get.

"The fundamental issue here I think is about matching the right skills and motivations with the right jobs in the economy - we have a supply side problem.

"We don't necessarily have the jobs in the economy that young British people want. If we do want to tackle youth unemployment then we perhaps need to think about structural reforms in the economy so we don't create these dirty, dangerous jobs that immigrants are being attracted into."