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Britain To Close Doors
Workers from Romania and Bulgaria may not be granted automatic access to Britain's labour market, a government spokesman has declared. The minister was responding to claims from opposition Conservatives that the government had hugely underestimated the number of immigrants from central European states, who now number around 600,000.
Romania and Bulgaria are set to join the EU in the next two years, and a further wave of immigration from both states, relatively poor by western standards, has been feared. Numerous stories in the media concerning the rampant criminality in Bulgaria, in particular, haven't helped.
Alastair Darling, the industry secretary, said that the government was looking into how to "carefully manage" immigration, in consultation with other member nations - Britain is one of three EU countries to have an "open access" program for workers from the ten states who joined the EU in 2004. Other big economies, including France and Germany, set strict limits on the number of immigrants they would accept, despite the EU's dedication to the "free movement of people and services."
Indeed, the spectre of the Polish plumber, undercutting French labour rates, came to symbolise French fears about EU expansion and contributed to the failure of the Constitution referendum in 2005.
Germany recently indicated that it would keep restrictions on movement in place until 2011.
Britain, on the face of it, was a different case. Unlike France and Germany, it had a labour shortage: The difficulty of getting a plumber or electrican at short notice - and the price you would have to pay for his services - had become the stuff of dinner party conversations. Furthermore, domestic help, in the form of childcare and cleaners, could be hard to come by in the prosperous south east. Despite some objections, there was a political case to be made for opening doors to workers from eastern Europe, at least to the middle classes.
Many market-and-US friendly Eastern European governments were viewed at the time as potential British allies: The fact that their citizens were culturally similar to their British hosts made the policy an easier sell than might be expected in Britain, where the public has never really been thrilled by its status as Europe's number one destination for immigrants and asylum seekers.
The government got its numbers wrong, however. Fears of a "tidal wave" of Eastern European immigration were dismissed with government predictions that workers would trickle towards Britain in the first two years following EU expansion. Official figures estimated between 5,000 and 13,000 immigrants a year.
Those figures woefully underestimated both the supply and demand. The number of eastern European migrants is thought to be 662,000, and the real figure might be higher still. Some right wing media sources report schools and hospitals are unable to cope with newcomers and their families, while other newspapers covered skills shortages in countries sending their young workers to Britain (and to a lesser extent, Ireland).
Concerns about immigration straddle the political divide: Immigration is red meat to right-wing politicans and newspapers, while on the left there are concerns that British workers are being displaced and that the immigrants themselves are being exploited by their employers.
The opposition Conservative Party, apart from a brief spell under Michael Howard's leadership, has steered clear of the issue. Voters are uneasy about large numbers of immigrants, but seem to avoid parties who attempt to make political capital from the issue. David Cameron's "nice" Tories are aiming for the votes of middle class families who have benefited from cheap immigrant Labour, but also for those who suspect discussion of immigration limits is borderline racist.
However, the political cost of immigration is rising. Unemployment in Britain is on the increase again, against the trend of falling unemployment in the EU. While the jobs Poles do and those being lost by native Brits may be quite different, sustaining current levels of immigration during a spell of rising unemployment is difficult.
Cameron's Tories stand to lose elements of their core vote, too. The hundreds of thousands of well-off, self-made plumbers, electricans, builders and other tradesmen are thought to be natural Conservatives - Thatcher's children, even. They've found themselves undercut in some cases, and can't be expected to be grateful for the competition. Even Susan Anderson, human resources boss of the Confederation of British Industry has shown concern about the numbers: "There is a strong argument to pause for a period before opening up to workers from further new member states while we learn the lessons from experience to date," she said.
Hence perhaps the Tories focussing on the issue again. They have a shadow minister for immigration, Damian Green, who echoed Anderson yesterday, demanding that the government "learn the lessons of the unprecedented numbers who came to this country after the last expansion of the EU."
Will Darling introduce transitional rules for Romanian and Bulgarian workers? It depends on how sustained the current influx becomes, and where it fits in the larger picture of immigration into Britain. For all their numbers, the 600,000 or so Eastern Europeans in the UK make up just over a third of the total of foreign nationals working in Britain. The figure topped 1.5 million in 2005, according to a report compiled by two immigration specialists.
Around ten percent of this figure comes from Ireland - most Brits hardly consider the Irish to be immigrants any more, though the Irish themselves may feel otherwise. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of western Europeans working legally in the UK, often taking advantage of the UK's more favourable entrepreneurial culture. Estimates as to the number of young Frenchmen and women in London - "the Free French", as one wag called them - varies between 150,000 and 350,000. The City attracts workers from all over the world. Britain's pubs would be empty if it wasn't for Aussie bar staff. At the other end of the scale are the poorer immigrants, asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, various African states, the exploited workers smuggled in from China and Asia.
The current eastern European influx fits somewhere in the middle: Not particularly wealthy or Anglo-Saxon, but not hopelessly poor or suspiciously different. To a certain extent, their long-term welcome depends on their own behavior and willingness to assimilate. Perhaps it is the scale, rather than the make-up, of the migration that concerns most people.
