The success of the eastern EU enlargement debunks current fears

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/19/success-eastern-eu-enlargement-debunks-fears

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As the EU continues to grapple with a variety of existential challenges, it is easy to forget that the European project has some genuinely significant achievements to its name. By far the most important of these is the successful eastern enlargement of 2004 and 2007, which brought eight former communist countries into the European "club", and extended the European zone of peace and relative prosperity to the Baltic region in the north and the Black Sea in the south.

Yet when the eastern enlargement is mentioned these days, few people tend to talk about peace and fewer still of prosperity. In the public mind, eastern enlargement is viewed almost exclusively through the prism of increased immigration, from east to west and from new to older member states. So how much of this is true?

Eastern enlargement undoubtedly helped to shape the European labour market in dramatic and unanticipated ways. When the new member states acceded to the EU in 2004, only Ireland, Sweden and the UK lifted all restrictions on workers from the new member states. Other countries, such as France and Germany, were much more hesitant about opening up their labour markets and only proceeded to do so on a sector-by-sector basis. Thereafter the patterns of inward migration within the EU diverged considerably.

The European commission has provided extensive analysis of intra-EU population movements after the 2004 and 2007 accessions. These studies demonstrate emphatically that the overall level of migration from new to older member states has been very modest. By the end of 2007, the 27 member states of the EU were home to about 29 million foreign citizens between them, of which 10.6 million were intra-EU migrants. Of this figure only about 40% were from the new member states. About 1.6 million Romanians moved abroad, 1.3 million Poles and about 300,000 Bulgarians. These figures represented about 7.2% of the Romanian population, 3.4% of the Polish population and about 4.1% of that of Bulgaria.

Where did these migrants go? The picture here is rather diverse. In the decade between 2002 and 2012 the UK and Ireland proved amongst the most favoured destinations for new member state nationals, not just because of the attractive employment prospects they offered, but because English is now unquestionably the dominant language in a world of technologically driven globalisation.

In the Irish case Polish migrants were hardly visible in 2002. The 2006 census, however, revealed that there were 63,276 Poles living in Ireland. By 2011, that figure had risen dramatically to 122,585, making the Polish minority the largest single national group in the Republic.

The figures for the UK reveal that by the end of 2011 about 1.1 million people had moved there from the new member states in the wake of enlargement. While this constitutes a sizable number, it is about equal to the level of migration from the new member states to Germany in the same period.

If we measure these migrant flows in relative terms, nationals from the new member states now make up about 1.5% of the total population of the UK. In Ireland, by contrast, they constitute about 4% of the population, and this figure has decreased from about 4.8% in 2008 (as a result of some return migration caused by deep-seated economic retrenchment). Therefore we can state clearly that eastern enlargement has had a much more significant impact on the Irish labour market than on the British one even allowing for differentials in economic performance since 2008.

From 2014, curbs on Romanians and Bulgarians coming to live and work in Britain will come to an end. When questioned about the expected volume of immigration from those two countries by the BBC on Sunday, the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, said: "I don't think anybody knows." But analysis of previous emigration patterns might give us a clue: whereas Polish nationals tended to choose either the UK or Ireland as their favoured terminus, Bulgarians and even more so Romanians opted for Italy and Spain. Indeed, by the end of 2011 nationals from those member states made up about 2.2% of the population of Spain (up from 0.6% in 2003) and 1.8% of that of Italy (compared to 0.3% in 2003). Thus in relative terms both Italy and Spain now have significantly larger proportions of their populations originating from central and eastern Europe than the UK.

There are also important differences between and among the new member states in respect of the propensity to emigrate. While young, well-educated Poles have grasped the new opportunities to live and work outside their homeland in large numbers, significantly fewer Czechs and Hungarians are willing to move. Slovenes also seem reluctant to move in search of work; in fact they do not move very much within their own country, let alone beyond its borders. Within the Baltic region Lithuanians have also demonstrated much more willingness to relocate than their Estonian neighbours.

The commission's analysis also emphasises the strong contribution to economic growth that these migration flows made. They clearly helped to alleviate labour market shortages and did so without impacting negatively on either the wage levels or employment conditions of workers in Dublin and London. The new arrivals complemented rather than competed with the existing EU15 labour force and in the process improved the general efficiency and functioning of European labour markets.

The new mobility of Bulgarian and Romanian labour is unlikely to change any of these fundamentals. For one thing, most of the individuals and groups one might expect to take advantage of the new rules have already moved. Madrid, Rome and Nicosia will continue to prove more attractive to new migrants than Galway or Glasgow. Thus the more hysterical pronouncements about a new "tidal wave from the east" are easily debunked: European migration patterns will continue to evolve in response to both "push" and "pull" factors. And Europe will continue to struggle with the multiple vectors of economic and political crisis.