http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cambridgeshire/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8530000/8530168.stm Evan Davis asks British and migrant workers to swap roles
The effects of immigration and migrant workers on local communities is the subject of a new BBC documentary.
Filmed in Wisbech, The Day The Immigrants Left explores what happens when unemployed workers take on jobs occupied by migrants.
Presenter Evan Davis also looks at how schools and the NHS are coping with the town's estimated 9000 immigrants, many from Central and Eastern Europe.
The documentary will be shown on BBC One on Wednesday 24 February at 9pm.
Role reversal
Would you want to work in a potato factory, harvest vegetables in the chilly flatlands of The Fens, lug bricks around a building site or work all hours in the heat of a busy restaurant?
And would you want to do it in Wisbech?
That's the challenge laid down in Evan Davis's one-off special, The Day The Immigrants Left.
A sweaty restaurant kitchen is one of the migrants' jobs on offer
Twelve unemployed locals take on roles currently filled by migrant workers in the town - but how do they fare?
'Back-breaking jobs'
Evan Davis told BBC Radio Cambridgeshire: "The programme started really with a hypothetical alternative world in which you ask 'what would society be like if we didn't have the immigrants here?'
"The conceit of it is to take immigrants out of Wisbech and to see how life continues there.
"We hear a lot of people saying that the immigrants have stolen our jobs, that there aren't any opportunities for Wisbech people.
"There are mixed results in the experiments we've done," he said.
"Some, you could see that the British workers were up to the job and could do it. And quite a few where you could say that the British workers didn't put their backs into it, didn't want to put their backs into it, or couldn't put their backs into it.
"What's undoubtedly the case is that a lot of these jobs are back-breaking jobs, and there is not a lot of demand by British workers to do these."
Find out how they get on
The Day The Immigrants Left is on BBC One on Wednesday 24 February 2010 at 9pm.