THE Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) published some startling figures on Thursday. The latest HMRC payroll data, their analysis reveals, shows that the number of young foreigners entering the workforce massively outstrips UK nationals.
Specifically the number of non-EU migrants on the payrolls rose from 82,000 in January 2020 to 370,000 in December 2025 – an increase of 290,000 and up 355 per cent over five years compared to just 11,000 extra young UK nationals.
This CSJ’s figures were published the same day as the publication of the Labour Party commissioned investigation into a record number of Neets (people Not in Employment, Education or Training) in the 16 to 24-year-old category; a number that topped a million rising by almost 200,000 between December 2024 and December 2025, Starmer’s first year in power.
‘A lost generation of idle youth’ was how this record of failure was described by Alan Milburn, the report’s author. Bruce Newsome put it down to a culture of useless degrees, entitlement and benefits for which Mr Milburn himself and his former boss Tony Blair must take much blame. However the CSJ has identified a further reason for these dreadful figures, pointing to the ignored role of almost half a million more non-EU migrants employed in sectors like retail and hospitality since 2020. This has fuelled the Neets crisis. Mass immigration cannot be ignored. Young men (typically those aged 16 to 35) make up roughly a quarter to 30 per cent of the total, while over half of all immigrants are male and the vast majority are young working-age adults.
Since January 2020, the CSJ reports, 27 young non-EU migrant workers have been hired for every additional young British employee. And the latest figures show the divergence in the employment between young non-EU and UK-national workers is getting worse. Between December 2024 and December 2025, the number of non-EU under-25s on payrolls increased by 33,200, while the number of UK-national under-25s fell by 32,200, an almost equivalent number. In the retail and hospitality sectors, non-EU workers of all ages rose by almost half a million (473,000) – nearly doubling – between January 2020 and December 2025, while UK nationals employed in the same sectors fell by over a quarter of a million (252,000).
The CSJ’s ‘digging’ also shows that the surge in non-EU employment is particularly concentrated in entry-level sectors that have historically been the first rung on the ladder for young British workers.
However what their analysis does not go into is what makes employers choose migrants over UK nationals, if indeed this is what they are doing. This omission begs the question of whether young UK nationals are applying and being rejected or not applying at all? More information is needed about numbers of applications and refusals across the migrant versus the UK national demographic.
Nor does the CSJ analysis mention any effect that DEI requirements might have on employers’ candidate selection. Are migrants preferenced by virtue of their ethnicity? This does not seem implausible. With starter roles simply vanishing across the jobs market, unsurprising given high National Insurance costs and their upward levelling for 16 year olds, the type of labour market that young UK nationals are trying to enter does indeed matter. The CSJ say protecting Britain from under-cut labour is an essential step to improving the pay, conditions and training opportunities for British young people. True. But even more important is it to stop migration, repeal DEI, put merit first and time limit welfare to young nationals, and not offer it to migrants at all.
Limiting welfare is an essential reality check on attitudes, another elephant in the room of the CSJ analysis. The all-party-favoured lockdowns of 2020 to 2022 resulted in an even more work shy culture than before. One less able to compete with a much tougher, survival-driven new migrants. But here’s the rub, while research proves the ‘migrant work ethic’ exists it shows it only does for the short term, reflecting a temporary survival strategy rather than an inherent cultural trait. Newly arrived migrants’ extra effort and lower absence rates (compared to native-born workers) normalise after about two years, after, my guess is, acclimatising to Britain’s ‘benefits street’ culture. However with no end in sight to high inward migration we can expect as the last group acclimatises it will be replaced with a new one, until they too find they don’t have to try so hard once they know how work the system. A grim prospect all round.
