Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:28 pm on 21 June 2017.
Well, Germany has a different problem. They will have a declining population over the next few years because their replacement rates are even lower than ours. There is a population bulge, which has long since been exceeded in Germany, and the German population will actually fall over the next 30 years. The opposite situation applies in the United Kingdom. We are adding, as I said at the start of my speech, 0.5 million people to our population every single year. Of course, if migration is, to all intents and purposes, in broad balance, this does not have a depressing effect upon wages generally. But the problem with the amendment that Plaid Cymru put down is that the academic study, which is referred to there, doesn’t actually look at the different segments of employment and the effect that immigration has upon different income levels within the global totals. So, the average figure doesn’t tell the whole story and, actually, is an obfuscation. It actually obscures the problem that we need to do something about. Because for many, many people now the minimum wage is the maximum wage, and that is not an acceptable situation, in my view. Eighty per cent of those who’ve come here from the EU are designated as low skilled or people who don’t have any skills at all.