Thank you for the detailed reply.
I agree with much of it to be honest. There are multiple factors involved in the whole shitshow.
However, youth unemployment is where my job focuses on and Milburns recent report on the effect of non EU migration on the NEETs was an eye opener.
People say that Brits dont want to work. Some do, some swing the lead. Always have done. Like many other nationalities there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to who claims benefits and how they act.
Yet here we are, as a country, neglecting our young and denying them entry level jobs because of other issues. That needs to stop.
In total agreement with you about the situation with young people and I'd say Millburn's report is actually a good example of my point. It details how badly we've let young people down and too often blamed them for the situation we've created. It should be a source of national shame and debate. However, it got some news coverage around the days of it's release and a bit of hand wringing commentary but that was it and it's already been replaced on our screens with rioting in Southampton.
The plight of 1 million of our young people is already tomorrow's chip paper in the eyes of much of our media.
I've only skim read Millburn's report so far but he talks about a number of complicated and interrelated issues but tbh I didn't really get a sense that he was saying immigration was a significant material part of it. He mentions it in relation to a couple of sectors but pretty much says it's not a main underlying risk. Certainly if you look at what's going to be required by way of solutions it's going to take a lot more than 'fixing' immigration to sort it. What we are reaping now is the results of decades of under investment in the country, and in the case of these youngsters, using FE as a prop to disguise or delay fixing our problems, failing to regulate SM, ignoring the growing mental health crisis and pretending that bizarrely a generation got out of bed one day and were biologically less able to cope than previous generations. Plus as Millburn points out a host of other things.
There's been lots of words along the way with lots of partial initiatives that have been underfunded and things have just got worse. The blunt reality is that young people get the crappiest hand in a declining economy and your other comment about the nurses suggests to me that if we carry on our current trajectory ever more working age people will continue to get caught up in the same situation. So what do we do about it?
I'm going to be interested to see what Milburn recommends in part 2 but if we're being honest, the shitshow he describes is not going to get fixed by a billion here or a billion there because as he says there are multiple interconnected structural issues. Milburn does actually say it out loud but not as loud as he needs to, inequality is killing this country. I'm not saying for a minute that there aren't people gaming the immigration system and I'm not saying there aren't some people gaming the benefits systems.
What I'm saying is that their impact is minimal compared to the people who are really destroying the UK economy. And that would be our super rich (and the super rich of some other countries too).
Gradually over the last three decades, the super rich have changed from being an active part of the economy who generated productive growth and value, to being predominantly extractors and hoarders of unproductive wealth. This means increasingly few help the economy grow by investing in industry or services, in fact they inhibit the growth. In the absence of that proactive investment for growth there are only two ways to fix things (1) the country gets itself further into debt borrowing yet more to invest in solutions and hoping the value of those solutions outstrip our debt or (2) improve the distribution of current wealth and that means taxing the wealth of the super rich.
If Milburn's part 2 glosses over this then he is just ducking the issue in the same way that the current Labour government has ducked the issue since day one. At this point pretending that sufficient growth will cyclically reappear is at best burying your head in the sand in the hope that an economic miracle comes along or worse indulging in fairy tale economics.
The national conversations we should be having are for example (and I'm not in the construction industry so this could be complete bollocks, I use it only as an example of the 'scale' of the conversations we should be having)...
What would it take to credibly invest in boosting the MMC sector in order to simultaneously:
1. Help solve our housing crisis
2. offer real and useful skills developments and meaningful jobs to a material proportion of the young people Milburn talks about
3. create a sector that could also provide exports to aid the wider economy
How many hundreds of billions is that going to take and how many tens of billions is it going to take to get it kick started ? What sources is that going to come from? What if a progressive wealth tax on the top 0.5% of wealthiest people in this country could generate somewhere between £35 to £45 billion pa - how much of a dent could it make in this problem? What tax breaks could we give the top 0.5% in this space if they actively invested in the country instead of simply taking money out of it and how might that boost the investment pot further?
There's a million other questions like how much preparatory work would be required e.g capability and legislation in order to stop us pissing the money down the drain? How many years is it going to take and what can we do in the early stages of the programme to give young people hope that this is real and not bullshit and what are we going to do to convince the markets we know what we're doing? But they are all predicated on getting the money from somewhere.
You could have a 'similar but different' conversation about AI. Or social care for that matter.
But instead we have a government too timid to do anything other than tinker in the margins and as a population we distract ourselves by arguing about immigration. I get why we do that because it's a lot easier than facing into the realities of where we are. But that's why we need some bolder vision from some proper leaders both in politics and in industry. Sure many of the super rich would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into being net contributors rather than a huge economic drain, and sure wealth mobility makes it harder to do than it would have been 30 years ago; but if not this and not now then what exactly are we going to do ? because a billion here or a billion there is going to have bugger all impact.
Sorry if I sound like I'm hectoring but I've had a fair bit of involvement with the FE sector and had a fair few young people through the doors of my small business to try and help in a small way with the crisis and it's just incredibly frustrating where we've got to as a country.
migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk
Telegraph report on young migrants or explore opinion coverage on the issue via the 
Telegraph's article on mass migration. [1]