Start with who is migrating where. Britain’s foreign-born population includes a higher proportion of people with tertiary education (broadly, university graduates and above) than in almost any other OECD country (see chart 1 for a selected list and here for the full data). Incomers are much more likely to be highly educated than native Brits, and that gap is growing.
This is thanks in part to the small number of Americans and others who flocked to the City before the financial crisis. It also reflects a flood of well-qualified east Europeans from 2004, many working below their ability, and a growing number of clever Asians and so forth who come to study and stay to work.
Predictably, they have found jobs—many of them good ones. The proportion of employed foreign-born men in Britain was above the OECD average in 2009-10; immigrants were hardly different from their native counterparts. Though around a fifth of people in migrant households figure in the poorest tenth of the population (around the OECD average), 8.5% are in the richest tenth, well above the norm (see chart 2).
The picture is more mixed for their children. Most do well in school, often beating the offspring of native English-speakers. More children of foreign-born parents complete tertiary education. But educational attainment does not transfer entirely smoothly to the workplace. The less-educated children of migrants are much less likely than children of native parents with similar education to be employed, perhaps because of stiff competition from newer migrants.
