Your Country Needs Them

A joint study (pdf) from Britain's Treasury Department and Home Office comes to the unsurprising conclusion that migrants to the UK are "a boon" to the economy and are fueling that country's economic expansion. The Guardian reports:

Migrants are more skilled and often more reliable and hardworking than British workers, and are fuelling the country's economic growth to the tune of £6bn a year, according to the first official study of their impact published yesterday.

The joint Treasury, Home Office and Work and Pensions study says that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Polish and other east European workers has had "no discernible" impact on unemployment and has led to only a "modest dampening of wage growth" for British workers at the bottom end of the earnings league.

For those of who have read British journalist Philip Legrain's book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, this is old news. As my friend Johan Norberg, author of the indispensable In Defense of Global Capitalism, said, Legrain "shows that migration can benefit the migrants, the country they leave and the country they move to."

In 2003, Nick Gillespie spoke with Norberg about In Defense.

Update: The NYT's Freakanomics blog interviews Legrain today.