On migration and economic migrants in the West Midlands

A migrant worker is someone who immigrates to another country to seek employment and improve his/her financial position. More and more people are becoming migrant workers, shifting from one country to another, either to seek work or progress to a better job.

Economic globalisation has triggered a rapid increase in cross-border movement of both goods and people, especially over the last two decades or so and human capital has become more flexible than ever. Foreign workers are increasingly common in certain countries (for example, in some Western European countries or the US).

Migrant workers are often concentrated within particular local economies, where they are helping to address labour and skills shortages in key sectors.

According to a survey released by Gallup (November 2009) around 16% (700 million adults) of the world’s population would like to permanently move to another country. If this happened the number of global migrants would more than quadruple.

There are about 686,000 official migrant workers in England at the moment (this is about 1.3% of the total population).

Understanding labour migration

At the launch of the State of the Region dialogue on population change Anne Green, from the Institute for Employment Research, spoke about recent developments in labour migration, such as the impact that the recession may have on migration and about the difficulties of measuring short-term international mobility.

Understanding migration is important when trying to understand population change.

Anne began by talking about the changes in migration from Eastern Europe and the implications for local areas. Recent data show that there has been a decrease in worker registrations from Eastern Europeans, particularly in large urban areas.

Economic migrants

The subject of economic migrants and what benefits or problems they bring has not been quite as topical in recent months as it has been in the past.

The downturn in the economy and the weakening of the pound are assumed to discourage migration and to encourage economic migrants in the UK to think of returning home.