A new report out today, The Economic Impact of Immigration, written by a House of Lords committee, has found that the recent record levels of immigration into the UK has had “little or no impact” on the economic well being of British people.

I’ve been listening to the radio phone-ins this morning and most people seem outraged by the findings of the report – the reason being that most people seem to feel only the negative effect of immigration. Clearly none of them have been looked after by the NHS recently - an organisation that is arguably propped up by immigration. Callers on BBC Five Live have been describing the impossibility of trying to live on the minimum wage when immigrants will work for less, and the inability of locals to now complete with lower-cost-harder-working immigrants.

Of course there is an issue. I wrote recently on this blog about the use of work permits by IT companies and how they can bring people into the UK on temporary projects that sometimes last for years. However, it is not as simple as the radio phone-in callers suggest and I thought it was a shame that when Danny Sriskandarajah, from the Institute for Public Policy Research, called in to explain some of the issues, later callers ridiculed him as a government puppet.

It’s actually our own industry that is creating a lot of the change in society today. IT is driving the automation and industrialisation of processes, in both services and manufacturing, and therefore changing jobs. Outsourcing and offshoring are essentially the migration of work to remote locations. Migration itself is becoming more popular as people consider it more normal to have to go and find interesting work.

I get fed up of listening to radio phone-ins where people moan about the foreigners stealing our jobs. The future of work is a much more subtle and complex situation and crude measures such as immigration caps won’t help - they might even damage the UK economy. When the powers-that-be start linking migration with outsourcing with automation with education policy and social welfare in the 21st century – then I might start listening.