How The West Was Won

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That hasn't gone unnoticed in the rest of Europe. The Polish story is feeding the debate as new countries such as Romania and Bulgaria join the E.U. As the Union continues to expand to the east, the toughest question facing its older members is whether to open labor markets. Among ordinary Europeans, opposition to enlargement has focused on the fear of losing jobs and the impact on expensive social welfare systems. (Despite their positive experience with Poland and other Eastern countries, both Britain and Ireland decided to maintain labor restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria for the time being.) For the moment, countries such as Germany and France are maintaining restrictions on labor from new member states — E.U. law permits them to do so until 2011 — but some experts are beginning to question the wisdom of waiting that long. Herbert Brücker, a migration expert at Germany's Institute for Employment Research, says Germany missed out by blocking the first waves of Polish immigrants. "This was a perfectly qualified generation of people from Poland that would have come here. Five years from now, we may only get what is left over. It may be too late."

That's why the Irish and British experience is of so much interest. Already Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have decided to follow suit and open their markets to the eight new members from Eastern and Central Europe who joined the E.U. in 2004. France, too, has eased some restrictions. All would do well to study the details of how Britain and Ireland coped. While granting admission to all workers, both nations restricted migrants' access to welfare, thus pre-empting claims that folks were coming as "welfare tourists" to leech off the system. At the same time, most of the new migrants are single, which means that more people are paying taxes into the system than are able to draw out of it. Their official status means they can go home at any time — unlike illegal workers, who often lack the documentation to travel, are less likely to benefit the public purse, and are much more vulnerable to exploitation, sometimes falling into poverty and serious crime.

Still, for all its success, the new migration did not start out all that well. In fact, had London and Dublin realized from the start just how many Poles and other East Europeans intended to migrate, they might not have opened their markets in the first place. Government economists in Britain had expected no more than 15,000 migrant laborers each year from the new E.U. countries; in Ireland 10,000 were predicted. In fact, 579,000 came to Britain in the first two years, more than one-half of them from Poland, and over 300,000 from Eastern Europe to Ireland. Low-cost flights to Dublin from Katowice, Cracow and Wroclaw were jammed for months. Newspapers sprang up to serve the new arrivals; bulletin boards outside Catholic churches across Ireland filled up with notices looking for laborers, many of the advertisements written in Polish. In one English county, officials have begun erecting Polish road signs because immigrant truck drivers were getting confused.

The influx, indeed, was "almost certainly the largest-ever single wave of immigration that these islands have ever experienced," according to John Salt, professor of geography at University College London. With 10,000 arriving in Ireland each month since 2004, the country of 4 million people experienced the fastest period of population growth since the current system for measuring migrant flows was introduced in 1987. "What happened here in two years is what happened in other countries in a generation," says Sean Murray, head of economic migration for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in Dublin.

Nor are there significant signs of all this slowing down. Budget flights from Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe to Britain and Ireland are still full with young men and women ready to sample a new life. In addition to Chudzicka's TV show, Ireland alone boasts six Polish newspapers, two radio programs and at least a dozen Polish websites. Poles can hear Mass in their native tongue in 100 places of worship across Ireland; the community was just granted its own cathedral, a stone's throw from Dublin Castle, which has around 2,000 worshippers every Sunday.