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“A large part of the jobs lost during the pandemic were held by non-British workers. And this is now reflected more in return migration than in unemployment rates,” the study said. Its authors are based on data from the working market.
This was particularly the case in London, where one in five residents is a foreigner: the capital’s population, according to the study, has shrunk by 700,000.
“If this is more or less accurate, it is the largest decline in the British population since World War II,” the researchers wrote.
According to them, there is no evidence that British living abroad have returned to the UK on a similar scale. At the same time, scientists acknowledge that this may be a temporary phenomenon and that a large proportion of foreigners may return to Britain after the pandemic.
The British economy is in dire need of foreigners. However, their exit from a pandemic is not the only danger. Many sectors also fear staff shortages due to Brexit and stricter migration laws.
Bloomberg recently reported that the number of Eastern European immigrants currently living in the UK has fallen to 2015 levels, driven by the end of the Brexit transition and the stagnation of the country’s economy due to the novel coronavirus.
The country’s stateless population began to decline more dramatically in June, and most of the emigrants were citizens of the so-called EU8 countries that joined the European Union in 2004, according to a report by Statistics UK on Thursday.
These Member States include Poland, Estonia and Slovenia.
Available data suggests that these workers will return after the end of the COVID-19 crisis. Immigration was a huge argument in the 2016 Brexit referendum, with many arguing that the bloc’s high degree of freedom of movement had created too much competition for UK citizens for jobs in their home country.
Companies in sectors such as construction and healthcare have been forced to adopt more flexible hiring policies.
The double blow to COVID-19 and Brexit could serve as an attempt to explain why there has been a sharp drop in arrivals from Eastern Europe to the UK.
During the first quarantine in the UK last spring, all non-essential businesses were temporarily closed, schools closed and some workers left.
London, whose service sector was hit hard by the new coronavirus, suffered the greatest loss of life.
Despite the number of emigrants, Poles still constitute the largest number of non-British citizens. In London, just over a fifth of the population are foreigners, the highest number in any region of the UK.
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