Immigration and Inter-Regional Mobility in the UK, 1982-2000

The possible effects of higher immigration, raising unemployment and lowering earnings for locals, has been a contentious empirical issue and it has recently come to the fore in Britain. Most studies that look across local labour markets, chiefly for the US but recently for the UK, have found the effects of immigration to be benign. One possibility is that an influx of immigrants from abroad to a specific area simply pushes non-immigrants onwards to other localities and thereby spreads the labour market effects over the whole economy. We investigate this issue looking at net internal migration across 11 UK regions over two decades. While we find consistently negative crowding out effects, the results are not statistically very strong. Neither are they enhanced when embedded in a model that includes other variables that drive inter-regional migration or one that examines bilateral population flows between regions. We conclude that this particular channel of adjustment is fairly weak.