Brexit opportunity for foreign workforce; Employment of non-European workers in the UK jumped

In the year ending June 2022, the UK broke the record for attracting foreign workers since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The latest official statistics released show a major change in labor migration patterns to the UK compared to the pre-Brexit period and the country's exit from the European Union.

Based on this, the number of foreign workers active in the British labor market increased by 223,000 people in the year ending last June, which is the largest increase since the beginning of 2020. More than 84% of this number, i.e. 189,000 people, are workers born in countries outside the European Union, and only 34,000 of them are citizens of EU member states.

Also, in the year ending March 2022, the number of foreign workers working in the UK increased by 184,000 people, of which the citizens of India, Nigeria and the Philippines took the highest share in obtaining skilled labor visas.

From January 2021 and the official exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, most of the citizens of this union who did not work in the United Kingdom before, having lost their work permit in this country, must be hired by an employer active in the British labor market with a salary of not significantly lower than the existing wage level, to be employed.

Therefore, the post-Brexit change has put the EU workforce in a similar situation to the non-EU migrant workforce. Of course, British employers are not very happy with this incident and complain about the imposition of more bureaucracy to attract labor. They also believe that they used to be able to attract an EU-born entry-level worker with an annual salary of less than £25,600, but new legal restrictions have made it impossible to apply the previous wages.

In this situation, the number of foreign workers born outside the EU working in the UK has increased from 3.1 million people in the last six years to 3.9 million people.