UK/FILE: UK immigration figures show more than 400,000 EU migrants have come to work in Britain since EU expansion

During a week when British newspapers have been filled with negative headlines about EU immigrants, the British government has announced that more than 400,000 east European workers have been allowed to work in Britain since May 2004. The figures released on Tuesday (August 22), vastly exceeding predictions and have fuelled calls for limits on workers from Bulgaria and Romania. The government said it approved 49,850 applicants from eight east European countries seeking to work in Britain in the second quarter of this year, bringing the total to 427,095 since these countries joined the European Union in May 2004. The figures stoked an intense political debate in Britain over the pros and cons of migration from eastern Europe. Opposition Conservatives said the figures reinforced the case for restricting immigration from Bulgaria and Romania if they get the green light to join the EU in 2007 as scheduled. "Controlled immigration makes life much better for everyone involved," Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green said in a statement, saying it would ease pressure on housing and public services. Government minister Tony McNulty said east European workers were benefiting Britain by filling skills and labour gaps that cannot be met from the UK-born population. But he did not rule out restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers, saying one option would be to delay the free movement of workers from these countries. "Firstly we need to determine quite when that is, it will be 2007 or 2008, we'll know that fairly quickly. But then we'll have to take full account of what each of the other countries do, regards to Bulgaria and Romania, and make a full assessment and analysis of our own labour market. We do have a range of limitations and restrictions that if we choose to we can impose and I can certainly assure people that we'll make the right and appropriate decision for the UK economy," he said. The government statistics exclude self-employed workers, who do not have to register. McNulty told the BBC that the number often quoted, if they are included, is something closer to 600,000. The number of workers who have come to Britain has greatly surpassed government forecasts that between 5,000 and 13,000 new immigrants would arrive each year. Britain's economy is still creating jobs after 14 years of uninterrupted growth. But with unemployment rising, critics argue that immigrants are taking jobs from Britons -- although some business executives dispute this. Policymakers say competition from east European workers has helped keep wage inflation in check, easing the pressure for higher British interest rates. Sixty-two percent of the workers coming to Britain were from Poland, followed by Lithuania with 12 percent and Slovakia with 10 percent. Britain was one of three EU members, along with Sweden and Ireland, that granted open access to workers from these countries when they joined the bloc in 2004, together with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Slovenia. The government is due to decide later this year whether Bulgaria and Romania will get the same treatment. Frank Field, a member of parliament for the ruling Labour Party, said an "open-doors" immigration policy was not sensible or sustainable. "I think it's important that because we do benefit from immigrant workers, there isn't a closed door policy, but we do have a quota system. And that employers need to show that they cannot get local people into jobs or local people who want to be trained into those jobs, before they actually employ workers from what was Eastern Europe," he said. But other politicians are concerned at the negative nature of the debate on Bulgaria and Romania's EU membership. "Well this debate is rather premature, and it's a bit one-sided and driven by government incompetence," said Edward Davey from the Liberal Democrats. "For a start, we don't know whether Romania and Bulgaria will be joining the European Union. That decision won't be finalised until next month. Secondly, frankly, it's all about the negatives of the issue, when actually immigration has been very positive for this country. And we wouldn't be here, if the government had managed immigration from countries like Poland, half way competently. What we ought to be doing as a government, is saying to the rest of the European Union, you should be benefiting from immigration like we've done, you should be taking away the protections on your labour markets," he added.

ITN Source | August 23, 2006

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