TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Lemos, Sara
AU  - Portes, Jonathan
        TI  - The Impact of Immigration on Wages and Employment in the UK Using Longitudinal Administrative Data
        PY  - 2025/Oct/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18199
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp18199
        AB  - We study the labour market impact of immigration to the United Kingdom, focusing on the large inflows following the 2004 EU enlargement. Using the Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB)—a longitudinal 1% sample of National Insurance records—we provide the first analysis of immigration’s effects on employment and wages based on high-quality administrative microdata. Exploiting individual, area and time fixed effects, as well as area-time, individual-time and individual-area fixed effects, we reduce endogeneity concerns that have limited previous work.

We find limited aggregate impacts, but distributional consequences: existing immigrants—particularly those who were young or low paid—experienced modest negative employment effects, while natives faced little evidence of displacement. For wages, impacts were mixed: existing immigrants overall gained, but low-paid immigrants lost. The results suggest labour market adjustment operated through both substitution and complementarities across groups. More broadly, we provide a methodological framework for analysing the much larger and more diverse post-2021 immigration flows.
        KW  - wages
KW  - employment
KW  - immigration
KW  - Central and Eastern Europe
KW  - UK
        ER  -