KUALA LUMPUR (Mar 2): Immigrants and robots are not taking over jobs. Rather, they are nudging locals into higher quality and better paying jobs, says the International Monetary Fund’s Finance & Development (F&D) magazine.

It quoted IMF’s advisor in its research department and head of IMF’s Jobs and Growth project Prakash Loungani as saying that immigration created jobs, with migrants performing the jobs natives were either unwilling or unqualified to perform.

It also cited World Bank’s researcher and economist Çaglar Özden as saying that while migrants often were blamed for flooding the job market, they rarely took jobs from natives.

“If anything, they tend to nudge local workers into higher-skilled and better-paying jobs — as managers, for example.

“Low-skilled migrant workers offer household help that allows educated women to work while their children are young,” Özden was further cited as saying.
 
According to F&D over 200 million people are  unemployed worldwide.

It is no surprise  that some fear immigrants and robots would take the jobs they so desperately need.

However, since the Great Recession which took out 30 million jobs, mostly in the advanced economies, global unemployment has finally fallen back to its pre-recession rate of 5.5%, it said

The magazine also pointed out that obstacles to immigration — geographic, linguistic, and bureaucratic — meant the share of migrants had remained stable since 1960 at about 3% of the global population.

Loungani said the largest economic benefit of migration for a host country was lower prices for consumers.

Given the pluses of immigration, recipient countries are wise to encourage it, while enforcing the taxation of immigrants' income and charging administrative fees to employers for visas, Özden recommends.

These revenues can then pay for skills development of natives and unemployment insurance for others who cannot be retrained.

“But there are also losers in the process and those are the stories we hear more about. Those who are too old to learn new skills or at the bottom rung of the ladder will lose out to foreign workers,” he said.

The report also highlighted that along with fear of cheap foreign labour, the concern that technology was a job killer was not new.

Citing fellow researcher Jim Bessen, Loungani said that despite fears of widespread technological unemployment, evidence showed that “workers are being displaced to jobs requiring new skills rather than being replaced entirely.”

The new skills in demand are people skills and those that complement the new technology, which as of now cannot be easily programmed into robots, he said.

It also noted the large wage gaps between countries that sent migrants and those that received them, and that  migration had little impact on wages.