Quarter of top earners in UK are immigrants
Virtually a quarter of the UK's top earners are migrants who arrived in the country as adults, according to an analysis of government tax data by the University of Warwick.
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Rob McNeil, deputy director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said it was no surprise that migrant workers were among the UK’s top earners, and that London in particular had “traditionally been a major draw for global talent”. He told People Management magazine: “Restrictions on lower-income labour migration from outside the EU for a decade has naturally skewed non-EU labour migration toward the middle and upper end of the UK wage distribution."He added that the overall composition of the UK’s migrant population was complex and encompassed both some of the country's highest and lowest earners. “But to imagine that work migration to Britain is primarily a low-income phenomenon is to misunderstand the process,” he said.The Cage report found that the sectors with the highest proportion of top-earning migrants were finance, medical, technology and professional sport, with two-fifths of the highest earning bankers being expats who were paid an average of £383,300. In medicine, 37 per cent of the highest-paid people working at UK hospitals were from abroad, earning an average of £160,400.Tech migrants involved in such areas as website and software development made up just over half of the sector's top earners, taking home £259,700 on average. In professional sport, 31 per cent of top-paid workers were from overseas.Given that freedom of movement from the EU ends on December 31, Gerwyn Davies, senior labour market adviser at the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), said that the new, points-based immigration system was likely to make hiring talent from abroad more costly for some employers next year.But he said the removal of migration caps and faster processing times promised by the new system meant “the new restrictions [would] probably have little bearing on employers’ recruitment strategies".He added: “The premium they gain in terms of skill and experience will significantly outweigh the costs in the vast majority of cases."The situation is very different for low-wage employers who will need to change their recruitment strategy given the lack of route for recruiting low-skilled labour from outside the UK.”Read more immigration news from Relocate Global.
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