From pub rants to government policy planning, the question of immigration is not going away. That is as it should be: wanting to reduce immigration was a prime motivation for those who voted for the UK’s exit from the EU, and how to satisfy that motive is a crucial policy challenge for the years ahead.
The latest contribution is a report from the Resolution Foundation. It mostly confirms what previous studies have found. The facts it documents are, however, so little known and so crucial to the Brexit policy challenge that it deserves widespread attention.
The key finding is that high immigration has had little effect on wages or employment, with two notable exceptions.