Immigrants given preference for UK jobs

United Kingdom, 30th November: Foreign workers seem to be getting jobs in the UK while native-born British workers are lagging behind.

This becomes evident after taking a look at the recent employment figures in the UK.

More native Britons are jobless--Unemployment in the UK is rising with the nation having around 2.62 million jobless people in the nation. And this is certainly a cause of serious concern for the coalition government. However, the problem currently faced by the UK is not just the soaring rate of joblessness in the nation but the fact that limited new job opportunities are going to foreign workers in the UK.

As per the latest statistics made available by the ONS(Office for National Statistics), the figures for UK-born workers has went down to 311,000 in a period of twelve months while the number of foreigners joining the workforce has gone up by 181,000.

This means on an average, nearly 500 foreigners got jobs in the UK each day in the last year. But, the number of UK-born workers saw a sharp decline.

Qualified immigrants get better-paying jobs than native Britons—Britons are losing out to immigrants in terms of employment, especially when we take into consideration immigrants possessing qualifications. This has been revealed by the findings of a latest study. Around 34 percent of immigrants in the UK possessing post-school qualifications are employed at better paying jobs than their native UK-born counterparts. This has raised alarming bells for the UK government.

Meanwhile, majority of company bosses say the fault lies in native-born UK residents who are quite lazy and also somehow lack qualities of attendance and punctuality deemed essential for any worker. Moreover, foreign workers also have positive attitude, a quality which is found less in UK residents.

No wonder, most employers in the UK give preference to hiring a foreigner over a native-born UK resident. This resulted in an increase of six percent in the number of foreigners with jobs in the UK even as the unemployment figures touched an all-time high since the last two decades.

The UK government, in a bid to control rising unemployment levels among native Britons, has announced a scheme of £1 billion over the period of three years to be given to employers giving preference to UK-born workers.