Across the border in neighboring Slovakia, Dusan Badi, chairman of a local Roma group, talks about migrating as well. After years of persecution he plans to leave for Britain with his wife and seven children. “We want to go West, where minorities are tolerated and have better opportunities.”
Isolated cases of disaffection–or harbingers of a mass cross-border movement that threatens Europe’s economic stability? The question is pressing. Next year 10 new members will join the EU, including eight from Eastern and Central Europe. In theory, that gives 73 million new citizens the right to live and work wherever they choose. Small wonder there’s anxiety in the shaky economies of the West. Doomsayers foresee hordes of migrants snapping up jobs at cutthroat wages. Locals will be forced out of work; unions will lose bargaining power. Says Ursula Engelen-Kefer, deputy head of the German Federation of Labor Unions: “We cannot open the floodgates to workers from the East with millions of Germans out of work.”
The pols see the danger. Germany, Austria and others are using exemptions in the EU enlargement treaty to deny workers from the new member states the unfettered right to work in their territory for seven years. And though welcome in places like Denmark, they won’t be entitled to welfare benefits. Among Europe’s major economies, only Britain will offer open entry to the Easterners–but not without controversy. Britain faces flood of new immigrants, the Daily Express reported recently. Migration Watch UK, an immigration lobby group, estimates that Britain is already on course to take in more than 2 million newcomers from around the world over the next decade. “For a small and crowded island, it’s shortsighted and extremely foolish,” says the group’s chairman, Andrew Green. Cosmopolitan London, critics warn, could become a migrant honey pot, straining already overstretched public services.
At least that’s how the scaremongers tell it. In fact, much of the alarmist talk is just that–empty talk. According to a slew of recent studies, worries about an immigrant flood are vastly overblown. Yes, average earnings in the new member states are often only a fifth of those in the West. But that does not mean folks are aching to leave. Indeed, the very reason Britain opened its arms to the new immigrants is precisely because it realized so few would actually come, says Roger Vickerman, an economics professor at the University of Kent. According to the EU’s projections, no more than 150,000 people a year will leave their native countries to go West. In a union of nearly 500 million, that’s hardly a flood.
Opinion polls confirm the assessment. In the Czech Republic, Labor and Social Affairs Minister Zdenek Skromach says his country’s surveys predict “minimal” migration. “Money is not the main motivation for Czechs,” he says. Poland is no different. Unemployment may be running at 20 percent, –but just 5 percent of the population say they would definitely cross the border to take up a job in the EU, and only 17 percent said they would “consider” it.
For the strategists in Brussels, that’s at once a relief and a disappointment. After all, migration is a handy way of plugging the skills gaps that blight European economies. What’s more, the aging populations of Western Europe will need an infusion of young blood. Germany alone will require an inflow of 300,000 a year by 2010 to maintain its population. And let’s not gloss over another uncomfortable fact: most Europeans would be happier to see migrants from inside the EU than the Africans and Asians who make up a growing proportion of Europe’s new settlers.
The reluctance of Easterners to pack up and move, though, should come as no surprise. In today’s EU, barely 2 percent of citizens live outside the country where they were born. Don’t look for the stereotypical eagerness of the U.S. worker to crisscross the country for jobs. The average American, who faces fewer practical barriers, is six times more likely to move within 10 years than his European counterpart. The EU’s own mobility task force, set up to study the stay-at-home habit, has identified a slew of concerns that keep Europeans home, whether newcomers or oldsters. Language is one. Bureaucratic complications are another. Try transferring pension rights from country to country or persuading foreign officialdom to recognize your qualifications. It’s no good setting out to work as an electrician in France, say, if the local employers or unions won’t recognize your skills. Add to this such matters as finding schools for the kids in strange education systems, or buying property under unfamiliar laws, and the disincentives to mobility quickly become large.
The new Europeans also have their own psychological motivations. Says Zdenek Liska, director general of the Czech Confederation of Industry: “Forty years of communism and closed borders taught people to stay in one place. Now they are used to being with their family and friends even if it means being without a job.” What’s more, the poorest in society, who stand to gain most from leaving home, are tied down by their poverty. They often don’t have the money to move, or they may simply lack the education and ambition to recognize or seize new opportunities that may be out there. Says John Salt, an authority on migration at the University of London: “It’s never the people right at the bottom of the heap who move; they just don’t have the resources.”
In the end, today’s immigration angst recalls an earlier era, when Greece, Portugal and Spain joined the Union. With EU membership spurring growth at home, few saw the need to gamble on a new future, even if they’d been willing to move. The same now holds for Eastern Europe, where increasing numbers of Western businesses are relocating operations, and where economic growth is creating new jobs. At bottom, the region is too far from misery to trigger the feared flood, especially among the white-collared. “Polish managers are already making almost as much their counterparts in Greece or Portugal,” says Pawel Bochniarz, a management consultant in Warsaw. “They’ll think twice before they move.” As always, the tug of the familiar counts more than money. Europe may have a common currency, but it’s decades, if not centuries, away from a common work force.
