Doesn immigration help to fill skills gaps in the UK?
Sometimes, but this should not be necessary except in extreme cases. The difficult areas are those in which a long training is needed to produce highly skilled British workers. For example, doctors and engineers. (If a settling immigrant Indian doctor with a spouse and two children replaces a permanently emigrating British doctor with a spouse and two children, it makes no theoretical difference to UK population size.) Most skills gaps, however, are due to poor labour market management, lack of mobility due to regional house price differentials, and the reluctance of employers to finance training. Since business employers have to pursue low costs to survive against their competitors, they often prefer to import trained labour to ‘growing their own’. This approach, however, does not usually benefit the ‘receiving’ economy or the ‘sending’ economy, though it may benefit the employing company by lowering wage levels. If an employer imports skilled IT workers from abroad rather than retrai
