Will you tell the liberals, or shall I? Part two

One of the statistics mentioned in my previous post was that 66% of Britons believe that immigrants undercut British workers and take their jobs. This particular belief is the one most frequently mocked by advocates of unlimited immigration, who like to depict it, usually harnessed in tandem with the straw man argument that "they take our women", as a claim made by the stereotypical crude, ignorant "white van men", who, many liberals like to believe, are the only source of opposition to immigration (aside, that is, from taxi drivers, and "racists"). As is so often the case, however, the mere fact that liberals don't want to believe it does not make it any less true (indeed, one might almost say that the probability of a statement being correct increases in direct proportion to the vociferousness of liberals in disputing it). As the Sunday Telegraph reports:

Mass immigration has been accompanied by a fall in the number of Britons with jobs, official figures show.

Since 2004, when citizens of eight central and eastern European countries were given the right to work in Britain, the number of UK-born people working here has fallen by 500,000, from 24.4 million to 23.9 million.

Over the period, the number of migrants in work, including people born abroad but now naturalised as British citizens, rose by 1.1 million - to 3.3 million. They now make up one in eight of the workforce.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), provide the strongest evidence yet that Britons have lost their jobs to immigrants, says a leading expert on immigration.

Robert Rowthorn, a Cambridge University professor who uncovered the findings, said: "It seems hard to deny that immigration from the new EU member states has had a negative impact on the employment of UK natives."

The good professor should be careful what he says. If any lefty student groups at Cambridge should get wind of it, they might try and get him sacked!