As the recession bites, unemployment soars, and protests against foreign workers proliferate, the publication of Office for National Statistics figures (pdf) showing that the number of foreign-born people in work rose last year would appear to confirm what opponents of immigration have been saying all along: foreigners are taking "British" jobs. But the picture is far more complex than that.

Note, for starters, that critics would single out immigrants whatever the statistics showed. When immigrants are in work, they are taking our jobs; when they are out of work, they are a burden on the welfare state. Immigrants can't win: they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Second, opponents of immigration (and others, including myself) have previously pointed out – correctly – that ONS migration figures were deeply flawed. In particular, they did not accurately count the number of migrants from central and eastern Europe, who as EU citizens can come and go freely. If many of the Poles taking up jobs in Britain were not counted in the boom times, they are unlikely to be counted if they have since lost their jobs or left now we are in a bust. Foreign-born workers may thus not be faring as well as the ONS figures suggest.

Third, the category that the ONS has highlighted – foreign-born people – includes British citizens born abroad and immigrants who arrived as children and are only now entering employment after finishing school or university. In fact, 40% of the UK's foreign-born workers are now British citizens. On what grounds would the wildcat strikers and opponents of immigration object to their employment?

The other category that the ONS provides figures for – non-UK nationals – includes people who have been in this country for decades but have never taken up British citizenship. Again, what would be wrong if more of them were now working? What we would really like to know is whether the number of recent migrants in work is rising, but unfortunately those figures are not available. We would also need more research into what is driving the employment trends, which again we don't have.

Digging a little deeper in the ONS statistics that we do have, one finds that the 175,000 rise in the number of non-UK nationals in work (which is subject to a margin of error of plus or minus 111,000) comes from an unexpected source. Employment among east Europeans has not risen, it has increased (subject to big margins of error) among Indians (up 24,000), citizens of the 14 other countries that were EU members before 2004 (up 25,000), South Africans (up 27,000), and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (up 31,000). At the same time, figures released to parliament last month show that the number of work permits granted to Indians last year rose by 24,000 to 50,000, while those granted to South Africans rose by 2,000 to 4,900 and those to Pakistanis by 1,700 to 3,300 (a mere 725 were granted to Bangladeshis). Together, this suggests that nearly all of the rise in the number of South Africans and Pakistanis in work last year is due to people who were already in Britain finding jobs, not new arrivals. Since the employment rate among Pakistanis, particularly Pakistani women, has historically been low, it is surely a good thing that more of them are now working.

The bigger point, which bears repeating again, is that there is not a fixed number of jobs to go around, so that making divisive statements about one group of people taking jobs off another is not only invidious, it is also inaccurate. Everyone who works creates jobs for others when they spend their wages as well as in complementary lines of work. Women who work are not taking jobs off men; black employees are not depriving white people of work; people from outside London who work in the capital are not nabbing jobs off those who were born there; and foreigners are not grabbing British jobs. The debate we should really be having is how to create more jobs. Investing more in our rickety infrastructure would be a good place to start.