Migrants taking four in five new jobs in Britain; Indians largest foreign workforce

Data from HMRC shows that in Dec 2025 Indian nationals held the largest number of jobs of any foreign nationality

TOI correspondent from London: Just one in five (734,000) of the 3.7 million additional payroll jobs created in Britain between 2014 and 2025 went to British nationals, a report by the Centre for Social Justice has revealed.This think tank, which studies the root causes of Britain’s social problems, found that EU nationals accounted for 408,000 of these jobs, while those held by non-EU nationals increased by 2.5 million.Data from HMRC shows that in Dec 2025 Indian nationals held the largest number of jobs of any foreign nationality, at 1,029,300, making up 16% of total payroll jobs held by non-UK nationals, an increase of 728,200 since 2014.“For too long, policy has prioritised adding migrants to the economy rather than unlocking the potential of even a fraction of the 6.7 million people in the hidden unemployment crisis,” the report “State of Dependency” states.“Rather than addressing the prospects, skills and productivity of the domestic population, ministers increasingly gave into public and private interest groups calling for importing labour.

Worse still, after the pandemic, turbocharged immigration — the so-called ‘Boriswave’ — was explicitly used to depress wages, which policymakers feared were feeding inflation.”Most of the increase has come since Jan 2020, with non-EU payroll positions rising by 2.1 million. Yet these jobs are concentrated in lower-paid sectors such as social care, hospitality and retail, which traditionally provided routes into work for the British unemployed.

The number of people receiving out-of-work benefits grew by 2.3 million over the same period.“Britain has practiced a form of ‘human quantitative easing’, importing workers to expand headline GDP while writing off millions of people who are drifting away from the labour market. Employers have gained unprecedented access to overseas labour while taxpayers have absorbed the growing cost of domestic worklessness.

But high immigration has also added substantially to the welfare bill,” it states.£14.3 billion of working-age welfare spending is now flowing to foreign nationals in Britain.The last two decades saw the British state spend £1.6 trillion on working-age benefits — over £1.1 trillion more than its capital investment on transport, science and technology, and housing combined.