Foreign-born residents perform around 60% of the jobs in hotels/restaurants and domestic services but other sectoral trends are less stereotypical, with migrant workers doing almost a third of London jobs in financial and business services.

Here are some of the findings on pay:

Migrants from rich counties tend to earn as much or more than non-migrants especially if they have been in the UK for a few years, but those from poor countries get substantially lower average earnings than non-migrants – despite the fact that their average qualifications are higher than those of the average Londoner.

While the authors conclude that there is not any evidence that migration has depressed wages for existing workers in most of the labour market, they think that this may have happened for the bottom 20% of workers. The evidence presented for this is that since the mid-1990s, the wage differential between London and the rest of the country for those in the bottom tier of jobs has been very substantially eroded. In 1995, London wages were on average 23% above those for the same set of jobs in the rest of the UK: by 2001 the difference was down to 6%. This didn’t happen for jobs higher up the scale, nor was it very evident early on, when migration levels were lower. The authors conclude that:

There must therefore be, at the least, a very strong suspicion that the real wages of those working the worst paid set of jobs in London have been substantially reduced as a consequence of the influx of new migrants, many of who, though formally qualified for better jobs, have been unable to access them at the point of arrival in London.

The upside, however, is that the positive knock-on effect has been more jobs – 20% more at this level by 2001 in fact. So the conclusion seems to be that migration has resulted in more jobs in catering, cleaning etc, but lower wages.