The author of an influential piece of economic research frequently
heralded by leading Brexiteers as evidence that immigration from the
European Union undermines native British wages has stressed that the
negative impact is “infinitesimally small” and that his findings had
been widely misrepresented.
In the EU referendum campaign last June Iain Duncan Smith cited
research by Sir Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen to argue, wrongly,
that workers’ average wages are 10 per cent lower thanks to EU
immigration over the past decade.
The same claim was repeated by two senior figures in the Vote Leave campaign, Boris Johnson and Gisela Stuart.
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