Honest Bob Jenrick's claim that "4 in 5 new jobs were taken by migrants" is misleading. Jenrick's claim rests on a calculation by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), the right-wing think tank founded and chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, which funding-transparency site Who Funds You? gave a D grade, the second-lowest transparency rating, in September 2023. It was then amplified by the Telegraph. While the basic arithmetic roughly holds, at each step the claim drifts further from what the data shows. 1. They are not "new jobs". The figure compares HMRC payroll counts in December 2014 and December 2025. That is a net change, not a count of jobs created. Millions of jobs open and close every year, and most are filled by UK nationals. In fact, people who were non-UK citizens when they registered for National Insurance held 20% of employee jobs in December 2025, up from 12% in 2014. Four in five payroll jobs are still held by UK nationals. 2. The numbers don't relate to individual people. The data counts payrolled employments, so one person with two jobs is counted twice. The Telegraph's own chart says as much. 3. Many of the "migrants" are British. HMRC records nationality once, when someone first registers for National Insurance, and naturalisation is not recorded. Someone who arrived in 2015 and became a British citizen in 2021 is still a "migrant" in this data. HMRC itself says this makes non-UK figures higher than the true counts. 4. "Taken" implies displacement the data cannot show. The CSJ says jobs "went to" non-UK nationals. Jenrick says they were "taken". The figures show who holds jobs, not whether anyone lost out. The Migration Advisory Committee found that, across all immigrants over the full period studied, there was no statistically significant impact of migration on employment. 5. The time frame drives the result. By the Telegraph's own chart, UK nationals accounted for roughly half the payroll growth between 2014 and 2019. The "one in five" figure depends on the 2021 to 2023 visa surge, which happened under the Conservative government in which Jenrick himself was Immigration Minister. 6. Self-employment is excluded. PAYE data leaves out roughly four million self-employed people, so it does not measure all work. In short, a narrow payroll statistic, which counts employments rather than people and permanently labels naturalised Britons as migrants, has become a claim about "new jobs" being "taken". The underlying data supports neither word. This fits a familiar Reform pattern: take a statistic, often from an opaquely funded right-wing think tank, strip away its caveats, and recast it as proof that migrants are taking something from “the British people”. Whatever the intent, the effect is the same: a narrow, heavily qualified finding becomes a story of grievance and resentment. It's wrong, divisive, misleading and pathetic.