IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v38y2022i1p97-111..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Shortages, high-demand occupations, and the post-Brexit UK immigration system

Author

Listed:
  • Madeleine Sumption

Abstract

One of the key questions facing immigration policy-makers is which jobs should be eligible for work visas. This question has dominated discussions about the post-Brexit immigration system, which has focused in particular on the issue of shortages. While the UK government resisted calls to open labour migration routes in low-wage or low-skilled jobs with high demand for foreign workers, workers in middle- and high-skilled jobs that are deemed to face a labour market shortage can qualify with significantly lower wages. This paper examines the arguments for and against using immigration policy to prioritize labour migration in ‘shortage occupations’. It argues that the idea is politically appealing but problematic in practice. Shortages are more difficult to measure satisfactorily than policy-makers may imagine, and different methodologies produce different results. This makes it unwise to develop an immigration policy that depends too heavily on the notion that the shortage list is an accurate reflection of what is really happening in the labour market.

Suggested Citation

  • Madeleine Sumption, 2022. "Shortages, high-demand occupations, and the post-Brexit UK immigration system," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 38(1), pages 97-111.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:97-111.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/grab046
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alicia Sasser Modestino & Daniel Shoag & Joshua Ballance, 2020. "Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 793-805, October.
    2. Martin Ruhs, 2013. "The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10140.
    3. Madeleine Sumption, 2017. "Labour immigration after Brexit: questions and trade-offs in designing a work permit system for EU citizens," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 33(suppl_1), pages 45-53.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Deboshree Ghosh & Heather Dickey, 2024. "The Wage Impact of Immigration into the UK After the Great Recession," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 25(4), pages 1943-1961, December.
    2. Michael A Clemens, 2022. "The economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 38(3), pages 449-486.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Madeleine Sumption, 2019. "Is Employer Sponsorship a Good Way to Manage Labour Migration? Implications for Post-Brexit Migration Policies," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 248(1), pages 28-39, May.
    2. Maciej Berk{e}sewicz & Herman Cherniaiev & Robert Pater, 2021. "Estimating the number of entities with vacancies using administrative and online data," Papers 2106.03263, arXiv.org.
    3. Grinis, Inna, 2017. "The STEM requirements of "non-STEM" jobs: evidence from UK online vacancy postings and implications for skills & knowledge shortages," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 85123, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Radu Vranceanu & Angela Sutan, 2023. "Should the firm or the employee pay for upskilling? A contract theory approach," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 44(1), pages 197-207, January.
    5. David Deming & Lisa B. Kahn, 2018. "Skill Requirements across Firms and Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings for Professionals," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 36(S1), pages 337-369.
    6. Dorte Sindbjerg Martinsen & Gabriel Pons Rotger, 2017. "The fiscal impact of EU immigration on the tax-financed welfare state: Testing the ‘welfare burden’ thesis," European Union Politics, , vol. 18(4), pages 620-639, December.
    7. Karelin, Iliya & Kapelyuk, Sergey, 2023. "Digital Skills of Russian Citizens: Regional Differences," MPRA Paper 119494, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. David, Blight, 2020. "Trends of International Migration since Post-World War II," MPRA Paper 106307, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2020.
    9. Mary A. Burke & Alicia Sasser Modestino & Shahriar Sadighi & Rachel B. Sederberg & Bledi Taska, 2019. "No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations," Working Papers 20-3, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    10. Mark Pennington, 2015. "Realistic Idealism and The Project of Political Economy," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(3), pages 366-379, October.
    11. Michael J. Handel & Alexandria Valerio & Maria Laura Sánchez Puerta, 2016. "Accounting for Mismatch in Low- and Middle-Income Countries," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 24906.
    12. Andrew Green & Lucas Lamby, 2025. "The Characteristics of the Artificial Intelligence Workforce across OECD Countries," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 68(2), pages 541-568, June.
    13. María Isabel Guerrero Molina & Juan Felipe Salazar Acevedo & Juli�n Taborda Giraldo, 2022. "Reflexiones sobre el Brexit y la migración: revisión de literatura," Apuntes del Cenes, Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, vol. 41(74), pages 111-139.
    14. Arenas-Arroyo, Esther & Fabian, Jacob & Mengel, Friederike & Schmidpeter, Bernhard & Serafinelli, Michel, 2025. "Demand for Green Skills in an Evolving Landscape," IZA Discussion Papers 18102, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    15. Binhan Elif, Yilmaz, 2016. "International Migration Trends and Policy Effects," MPRA Paper 106103, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2016.
    16. Choi, Sekyu & Figueroa, Nincen & Villena-Roldán, Benjamin, 2020. "Wage Cyclicality Revisited: The Role of Hiring Standards," MPRA Paper 120307, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 21 Apr 2022.
    17. Andreas I Mueller & Damian Osterwalder & Josef Zweimüller & Andreas Kettemann, 2024. "Vacancy Durations and Entry Wages: Evidence from Linked Vacancy–Employer–Employee Data," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 91(3), pages 1807-1841.
    18. Richard J. Paulsen, 2022. "Arts majors and the Great Recession: a cross-sectional analysis of educational choices and employment outcomes," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 46(4), pages 635-658, December.
    19. Adamson, Fiona, 2019. "The Migration State in the Global South: Nationalizing, Developmental, and Neoliberal Models of Migration Management," SocArXiv wze2p, Center for Open Science.
    20. Perna, Roberta & Umpierrez de Reguero, Sebastián, 2025. "Intra-EU migration and healthcare deservingness: A conjoint experiment in Belgium and Spain," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 367(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:97-111.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.