Ben BrindleMadeleine SumptionJonathan PortesBen Brindle, Madeleine Sumption and Jonathan Portes find that despite the changes to the migration system, the relative earnings of the very large cohorts of new non-EU entrants in 2022 and 2023 are very similar to that of the 2021 cohort, and higher than in most of the pre-pandemic period.
We know a lot about migrants in the UK iran rcs data labour market – where they work, how much they earn and so on. But most of this is based on ‘snapshots’ of the entire resident migration population, lumping those who arrived relatively recently together with those who have been here for years or decades.
Our latest research uses data from HMRC on payroll employees, which includes information on when migrants took up employment in the UK. This means that, for the period since 2014, we can look at both changes in the composition of new migrant employees, and the earnings trajectories (in aggregate) of different migrant cohorts, as well as measuring how many remain in the payroll employee workforce. As a result, we can follow what happens to migrant groups over time – an advance on snapshot data. At a time when both the volume and composition of migration flows to the UK have changed rapidly, what is happening to recent arrivals is obviously of great interest.