HEAR ALL SIDES: Letters to the Editor. Picture: Nick Ansell/PA Wire
YOUR comment headlined “Warnings from Industry” goes along with the age old myth that immigrants can fill vacancies (Echo, Feb 18).
The reality is that immigrants themselves purchase food, fuel and other goods and services, which means employers need yet more labour, which just increases the number vacancies. The net effect on the number of unfilled vacancies is about zero.
And anyone who doesn’t believe that should consider the fact that the US has been absorbing immigrants at the rate of roughly a million a year for about two hundred years. Yet mysteriously the number of unfilled vacancies as a proportion of the workforce remains about the same year after year and decade after decade.
Ralph Musgrave, Durham
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