Posted Sunday, February 22, 2004; 15.21GMT
The new members — like the Greek daffodil pickers — see a very different image from their end of the telescope. Aren't we Europeans too, with equal rights?, they ask. Do you think we really crave the dirty jobs your own citizens disdain so much that we won't go home again as soon as we've put some money in the bank? Father Christophe Dziech is a Polish priest at
[In the U.K., E.U. enlargement will lead to] a population rise equivalent to seven cities the size of Birmingham
— ANDREW GREEN, Migrationwatch chairman
Notre Dame de l'Assomption church on the Rue Saint Honoré in Paris whose flock includes a group of some 500 Polish parishioners who attend the Sunday-evening youth service. They are mostly hardworking young people, about half of them illegals. He thinks the restrictions on workers from the East are unfair, because they will drive people underground where they are more likely to be exploited. "It's incomprehensible," he says. "This is a two-speed Europe: one for the rich countries, one for us."
Migration is a perfect topic for appeals to the political gut. Many nations in Europe haven't adjusted from being sources of emigrants to being magnets for newcomers from different cultures. And because no one can say how many migrants will decide to decamp from the accession countries, where they'll go or for how long, it's impossible to counter fear with facts. Those who predict a deluge have some evidence. Poland, the biggest newcomer, has about 40 million people and nearly 20% unemployment. A recent poll showed that 21% of Poles would either "certainly" or "probably" look for work in the West. Among those under 24, and among students, the figure is 50%. Already, around 317,600 Poles work legally in Germany despite its 10.2% unemployment rate, on top of a large number of illegals. (The building trade alone is estimated to have 300,000 illegals, many of them Poles.) The Estonian newspaper Molodezh Estonii recently fretted that a British firm was recruiting bus drivers on a large scale — paying six times the local salary. The last time there was a labor exodus from Estonia, "the scientists were the first to go," the paper warned.
Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, a British pressure group, predicts "a population rise equivalent to seven cities the size of Birmingham" in the next 30 years. Justin Barrett, a veteran Irish anti-E.U. campaigner, fears the economic disparities between West and East are so great that stanching the flow of people will require defying demographic gravity. "In Estonia, you get welfare payments of €6.44 a week. You can get €124 [in Ireland], and that's before housing is provided. Wouldn't you think of going to Estonia if it was the other way around?"
Well — maybe not. Surveys "often exaggerate the proclivity to move," says Danny Sriskandarajah, a research fellow in migration at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. It's easy to say yes to a pollster, harder to uproot yourself. "People don't want to move from Manchester to London, let alone abroad," he says. "The normal behavior seems to be that people are immobile, leaving aside war and catastrophe," says Hubert Krieger, research manager at Dublin's European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. In the 1980s, when Greece, Portugal and Spain joined the E.U., very similar warnings were sounded about people flooding north. Existing members restricted entry for up to seven years. What happened? The flows were negligible. Some 10,000 Greeks and 7,700 Portuguese per year moved to other E.U. countries, according to a study for the British Home Office. More Spaniards actually moved back to Spain than emigrated, drawn to its own booming economy.
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