Workers from Ireland have dropped out of the list of top-10 nationalities seeking jobs in Britain. — Reuters
LONDON: Irish workers have been making the short trip over to Britain to find employment for centuries, escaping famine and more recently the aftermath of the financial crisis.
But new data suggests that job seekers from across the Irish Sea are drying up after Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU) amplified a growing anti-immigrant tone coming from politicians.
Workers from Ireland have dropped out of the list of top-10 nationalities seeking jobs in Britain, according to data from the recruitment site Indeed covering interest in vacancies from across the world.
That marks a sharp reversal from the situation in 2016, when Irish ranked second in Britain.
It’s part of a seismic shift in the make-up of foreign labour seeking employment in Britain.
Record levels of immigration made the issue a political hot-button in Britain’s general election campaign, with Brexit shifting the flow of foreign workers into Britain away from the EU and toward countries further afield.
While official data shows migrant flows from the EU, Indeed’s data provides more up to date figures that drills down into where job-seeker interest is coming from within the bloc.
It showed that in 2016, the top four countries where workers were searching for British jobs were the United States, Ireland, France and Spain.
In 2024, it had shifted to India, the United States, Pakistan and Australia. Ireland, Italy, Austria, Poland and Romania have dropped out of the top 10 altogether.
Nigeria, the UAE and South Africa were among the countries to enter the top 10.
Nigel Farage, who leads the Reform UK party, has sought to capitalise on anger about immigration and is gaining traction in polls with a promise to clamp down on arrivals.
That’s left Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on the defensive after the government let migration spiral ever higher during 14 years in office.
With eight days to go until the general election, the governing party plumbed new depths of 20.2% in the Bloomberg composite, a rolling 14-day average using data from 11 polling companies.
Applicants looking for British jobs switched from being predominately Europe-based in 2016 to far-flung corners of the world, which have seen barriers to entering Britain liberalise since Brexit.
It led to a plunge in job seekers from Ireland, Italy and Poland, replaced by those from Asia and Africa.
Job seekers are now coming from the “Anglosphere, former Commonwealth countries, and certainly African countries in the case of healthcare”, said Jack Kennedy, economist at Indeed Hiring Lab.
“We definitely see that the share of those countries has increased at the expense of European countries.”
Irish citizens can work and live freely in Britain under a mobility agreement that predates the EU, but shifts in immigration rules have had a bigger impact on those from other countries.
Those controls made it harder for British companies to bring in cheap labour from the EU, but they also cracked open the door a little wider to people from non-EU countries.
For the Irish, the shift could also reflect a strengthening jobs market at home and other parts of Europe.
Ireland’s unemployment rate of 4% is near lows reached in the middle of last year – and below Britain’s reading. — Bloomberg
