Tony Blair's EU speech: no link between immigration and jobs?

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to the CBI yesterday on Europe has caused a stir. While some have speculated that he might be lining himself up to throw his hat into the ring for the position of President of the European Commission, the Daily Mail reported that he "was accused of 'mind-boggling arrogance' last night after claiming mass immigration made no difference to the job prospects of unemployed Britons."

But this isn't actually what he said. He told the CBI:

"The answer to the white, working class, unemployed youth in alienated communities in Britain, is not to tell them their problems would be solved if there were fewer Polish people working in the UK; it is to provide them with the education and the skills and the connectivity that gives them the ability to face the world's challenges and overcome them. Anything else is worse than a delusion..."

As for the question raised by the Mail of what impact immigration has on the job prospects of native Britons, Oxford University's Migration Observatory said in a summary of research on the issue: 

"Anybody who argues that it is 'obvious' or 'clear' that immigration does or does not create unemployment in the UK needs to think again".

For more detail, take a look at our previous piece on the topic.