IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v38y2022i1p97-111..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Shortages, high-demand occupations, and the post-Brexit UK immigration system

Author

Listed:
  • Madeleine Sumption

Abstract

One of the key questions facing immigration policy-makers is which jobs should be eligible for work visas. This question has dominated discussions about the post-Brexit immigration system, which has focused in particular on the issue of shortages. While the UK government resisted calls to open labour migration routes in low-wage or low-skilled jobs with high demand for foreign workers, workers in middle- and high-skilled jobs that are deemed to face a labour market shortage can qualify with significantly lower wages. This paper examines the arguments for and against using immigration policy to prioritize labour migration in ‘shortage occupations’. It argues that the idea is politically appealing but problematic in practice. Shortages are more difficult to measure satisfactorily than policy-makers may imagine, and different methodologies produce different results. This makes it unwise to develop an immigration policy that depends too heavily on the notion that the shortage list is an accurate reflection of what is really happening in the labour market.

Suggested Citation

  • Madeleine Sumption, 2022. "Shortages, high-demand occupations, and the post-Brexit UK immigration system," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 38(1), pages 97-111.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:97-111.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/grab046
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alicia Sasser Modestino & Daniel Shoag & Joshua Ballance, 2020. "Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 793-805, October.
    2. Martin Ruhs, 2013. "The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10140.
    3. Madeleine Sumption, 2017. "Labour immigration after Brexit: questions and trade-offs in designing a work permit system for EU citizens," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 33(suppl_1), pages 45-53.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Deboshree Ghosh & Heather Dickey, 2024. "The Wage Impact of Immigration into the UK After the Great Recession," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 1943-1961, December.
    2. Michael A Clemens, 2022. "The economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 38(3), pages 449-486.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maciej Berk{e}sewicz & Herman Cherniaiev & Robert Pater, 2021. "Estimating the number of entities with vacancies using administrative and online data," Papers 2106.03263, arXiv.org.
    2. Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen & Gabriel Pons Rotger, 2017. "The fiscal impact of EU immigration on the tax-financed welfare state: Testing the ‘welfare burden’ thesis," European Union Politics, , vol. 18(4), pages 620-639, December.
    3. Karelin, Iliya & Kapelyuk, Sergey, 2023. "Digital Skills of Russian Citizens: Regional Differences," MPRA Paper 119494, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. David, Blight, 2020. "Trends of International Migration since Post-World War II," MPRA Paper 106307, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2020.
    5. Mary A. Burke & Alicia Sasser Modestino & Shahriar Sadighi & Rachel B. Sederberg & Bledi Taska, 2019. "No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations," Working Papers 20-3, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    6. Choi, Sekyu & Figueroa, Nincen & Villena-Roldán, Benjamin, 2020. "Wage Cyclicality Revisited: The Role of Hiring Standards," MPRA Paper 120307, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 21 Apr 2022.
    7. Andreas I Mueller & Damian Osterwalder & Josef Zweimüller & Andreas Kettemann, 2024. "Vacancy Durations and Entry Wages: Evidence from Linked Vacancy–Employer–Employee Data," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 91(3), pages 1807-1841.
    8. Adamson, Fiona, 2019. "The Migration State in the Global South: Nationalizing, Developmental, and Neoliberal Models of Migration Management," SocArXiv wze2p, Center for Open Science.
    9. Carlos Carrillo-Tudela & Hermann Gartner & Leo Kaas, 2023. "Recruitment Policies, Job-Filling Rates, and Matching Efficiency," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 21(6), pages 2413-2459.
    10. Alexander Reilly, 2015. "Low-cost labour or cultural exchange? Reforming the Working Holiday visa programme," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 26(3), pages 474-489, September.
    11. Ludger Woessmann, 2024. "Skills and Earnings: A Multidimensional Perspective on Human Capital," CESifo Working Paper Series 11428, CESifo.
    12. David McKenzie & Dean Yang, 2015. "Evidence on Policies to Increase the Development Impacts of International Migration," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 30(2), pages 155-192.
    13. Suresh Naidu & Yaw Nyarko & Shing-Yi Wang, 2016. "Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 124(6), pages 1735-1792.
    14. Usabiaga, Carlos & Núñez, Fernando & Arendt, Lukasz & Gałecka-Burdziak, Ewa & Pater, Robert, 2022. "Skill requirements and labour polarisation: An association analysis based on Polish online job offers," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    15. David McKenzie, 2014. "The tyranny of experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor, by William Easterly," Journal of Development Effectiveness, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(2), pages 211-214, June.
    16. Bożena, Chrząstowska, 2018. "The Effectiveness of Migration Policies," MPRA Paper 106128, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2018.
    17. Rudolf Winter-Ebmer & Jasmin Anderlik & Malika Jumaniyozova & Bernhard Schmidpeter, 2024. "Monopsony: Wages, wage bargaining and job requirements," Economics working papers 2024-15, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    18. Philip Martin, 2014. "The Global Economic Crisis and the Future of Migration by Bimal Ghosh , Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013 , xvii + 338 pp," The Developing Economies, Institute of Developing Economies, vol. 52(2), pages 202-205, June.
    19. Suresh Naidu & Yaw Nyarko & Shing-Yi Wang, 2014. "Worker Mobility in a Global Labor Market: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates," NBER Working Papers 20388, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Hemelt, Steven W. & Hershbein, Brad & Martin, Shawn & Stange, Kevin M., 2023. "College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:97-111.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.