Jonathan Portes

Full document

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e6...

The Home Office also recognise that this may have an impact on user of care services who are likely to be older people and those with disabilities. The Home Office believes that despite these points the changes are justified for a number of policy reasons including reducing net migration and ending reliance on overseas recruitment.

Home Office Ministers state publicly, on the record, that they are deliberately making life worse for older people and people with disabilities who depend on care services, but it's worth it because it reduces net migration.

''The Home Office believes that despite these points the changes are justified for a number of policy reasons including reducing net migration and ending reliance on overseas recruitment. ''

The points:

If an immigrant eats a sandwich, that consumes real resources too (that of course is why the lump of labour fallacy is a fallacy).

I'm not entirely sure what point you're making/what you think an IA "should" measure.

the construction of a house (for which the occupiers, migrant or native, will presumably pay market price/rent) is not a "cost" (fiscal or economic) in an IA

[on infrastructure, yes, but the OBR analysis (which underlies part of this IA) actually *does* account for that, so you're not quite right on that. And it makes little difference.

agree there are a range of reasonable views on productivity impacts - but it's clear that the economists who wrote this basically agree that these changes are more likely to be negative than positive, contrary to the main text

But the good news is, by doing this, we defeated racism in the UK.

And indeed the evidence on productivity published by the MAC is that these changes will *reduce* productivity not increase it -so the likely impact is even *more* negative.

But that's (as you know) unevidenced BS. It says there are quantified costs and "the rationale for the changes" is that they might increase productivity but they have absolutely no evidence to back that up .

Boy, the Prime Minister who’s repeatedly said that growth is his number one priority will be furious when he hears about this!

Government has now - belatedly -published the impact assessment for the changes to skilled worker and care worker visas announced in May.

Impact is estimated between -£2 billion and £-10 billion (central - £10 billion).

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6937e6...

We got a new paper out on Ukrainian #refugee entrepreneurs in Poland, with Cevat Giray Aksoy and Piotr Lewandowski. Check it out here: cevatgirayaksoy.com/wp-content/u... and see below for a THREAD!!! 👇 #EconTwitter

Welcome to Britain, a country so short of dentists that an MP's 87-year-old mum pulled her teeth out with pliers. Also a country with thousands of foreign-qualified dentists who can’t work until they pass an exam so oversubscribed it’s like trying to book Glasto tickets. www.ft.com/content/f4e5...

We want global talents (but only if they are rich) Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham Last week’s intervention by a leading UK scientist over the prohibitive cost of visas raised an uncomfortable truth: Britain’s migration system is not — or is…

We say we want “global talent,” but what if our visa system only welcomes the wealthy?

Read more 👇

nandosigona.info/2025/12/08/w...

#globaltalent #visa #migration #Labour

Why Israel should remove itself from the Eurovision Song Contest or be banned, in two pix

We’re mad because we’ve spent nearly a decade shouting at you people that this was precisely where it was all leading and you ignored us and forged ahead anyway.

Mel should have been referred to Prevent long ago but here she is on Sky.

you've got a typo there

Mini thread on the ET decision in Peggie

Top line: It says exactly what we have been saying for months. The decision of the Supreme Court was not to turn the Equality Act 2010 into a nationwide bathroom ban - regardless of how anti-trans organisations have sought to misrepresent the law.

🧵👇

Nerd's Eye View: 11 things you need to know about immigration Digging into the detail and data to separate the noise from the news

"Incidentally, in the 1960s and 1970s, when net migration was running at minus 50,000 a year, more than 85% of Britons still thought immigration was too high."

Last week's New World column ocncerned immigration to the UK.

Because of course Henry had got the full roll call from Dulwich College and of course Trevor Phillips couldn’t even be bothered to read the stories he’s writing about

in the second ,he wrote that "most experts" would put the number of "illegal immigrants" "nearer to two million". [an entirely invented number.]

The Times defence was that he was "drawing on his expertise."

I've complained to IPSO about 2 recent Phillips columns.

He wrote "the fact that a plumber is likely to earn more than a professor."

The Times defence is that this was an opinion column...

The sheer laziness is one of the things that bothers me most about the style of column writing Phillips embodies.

If I make a small mistake in a post I spend all day wanting to crawl into hole but these guys will just happily write any bollocks without any research at all.

The Digital Service’s Act Main Character: the EU Commission finally fines X Steve Peers , Professor of Law, Royal Holloway University of London Photo credit : Animated Heaven, via Wikimedia Commons   Intr...

A lot has been said about the European Commission’s latest enforcement action against Twitter under the DSA. Now @stevepeers.bsky.social has done a great analysis on the topic

eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

The “Labour” Party finds itself arguing ordinary workers, carers and others are “takers”.

On a purely factual point, Trevor Phillips’s column in the Times misrepresents our reporting in casting doubts on claims that there were more boys called Patel than Smith at Dulwich in 1980 (we did not report 1976 as the year it occurred). 1980 roll shows 13 Patels and 12 Smiths.

Richard Baldwin receiving the award from Beatrice Weder di Mauro at the 2025 Paris Symposium. 🎉Congratulations to Founder & @voxeu.org Editor-in-Chief, @baldwinre.bsky.social, who was awarded the CEPR Lifetime Achievement Award! This honour recognises his long-term dedication, leadership and scholarship that have shaped CEPR and had a lasting impact on economics more broadly. #CEPRParis2025

🎉Congratulations to Founder & @voxeu.org Editor-in-Chief, @baldwinre.bsky.social, who was awarded the CEPR Lifetime Achievement Award!

This honour recognises his long-term dedication, leadership and scholarship that have shaped CEPR and had a lasting impact on economics more broadly.
#CEPRParis2025

It isn't that long ago, a few years perhaps, where saying this out loud would have been career suicide. How far we have fallen in such a short time. :(