Jonathan Portes
Professor of Economics and Public Policy, King's College London; Senior Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe. Immigration, economics, public policy. Personal views only; usual disclaimers apply.
Books: Immigration (Sage), Capitalism (Quercus)
- "Migrants.... are overall more likely to be in work and have slightly higher wages. It follows almost automatically that their short-term impact is to boost, not reduce, GDP per capita. Indeed, that’s exactly what the ONS says.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- Stop the genocide: Tom Fletcher @tomfletcherun.bsky.social speaks for Britain, and the world.
- "The UK is very good – much better than most European countries – at integrating migrants, because most Britons, and most migrants, want integration... The rhetoric and policy we saw yesterday will take us backward to a much uglier, and more dangerous, place." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- "The government's argument sounds plausible. There's just one problem. It doesn't fit the facts. And the government knows it." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- This chart from Immigration White Paper illustrates quality of government's underlying "analysis." 1. Numbers are completely wrong (in fact non-EU employment in health/care rose by over 100K). 2. Doesn't say what time period this is. 3. Footnote to source says data is from OECD (it's from HMRC)
- One again, this is simply not true. Non-UK origin employeea have (slightly) higher median earnings than UK-origin ones -and the gap has if anything widened (slightly) recently.
- For anyone who's just seen Yvette Cooper talking about the immigration white paper, I set out some of the evidence and facts here. [1/?] www.independent.co.uk/voices/tight...
- The claim by Yvette Cooper that there is a link between immigration and higher levels of inactivity (related to sickness and disability) has absolutely no basis in evidence or data. Just retrofitting the evidence to the policy...
- Full text of US-UK "deal" confirms: 1. *Not* a "free trade" deal. 2. For UK, largely successful damage limitation: limiting US tariffs on cars/steel for not very much. But damage still done. 3. For Trump, pretty much complete climbdown. (1/3) assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/681d32...
- Worth UK-bases commentators seeing what credible US economists are saying.
