EU Countries Fear Mass Migration from the East

While the expansion of the EU by ten member states in May this year is seen by many as a historical milestone, it has also raised fears of mass migration of labor from the poorer, mostly ex-communist new members to the more affluent west.

EU skeptics say a large influx of low-wage workers would prove devastating to current members of the bloc, who are already facing stubbornly high unemployment rates.

Prime Minister Tony Blair told parliament on Wednesday that he was re-evaluating his earlier stance on the issue, and might advocate imposing immigration controls and welfare benefit restrictions on immigrants from the 10 new countries.

“It is important that we recognize that there is a potential risk from these accession countries,” Blair (photo) told parliament. “We will take whatever measures are necessary to make sure that the ‘pull factor’ which might draw people here is closed off.”

The draw, he said, could be Britain’s welfare benefit system, and it would be re-examined to determined whether it was “too generous.”

Change of heart

Britain’s new jumpiness about eastern migration comes in the wake of Sweden’s decision last week to impose limits on workers from the new EU countries. The Netherlands also said recently it would impose a limit on the number of immigrant workers it would accept.

Norway, though not an EU member but with close ties to the bloc, said on Thursday it is also exploring possible restrictions, although it has previously stated its borders would be open to new EU citizens.

“We now see that some of our neighboring countries, and now Sweden, state that they will have some exceptions for some years, for an interim period,” Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik told reporters on Thursday after talks with European Commission President Romano Prodi. “So we also now…intend to make a proposal for parliament about some possible exceptions for an interim period so we are more in line with our neighboring countries.”

For two years after enlargement, labor market access with depend on national policies, and not be dictated by Brussels. According to the European Commission, only about half the 15 member states have told the EU about their plans.

Austria, Finland, Belgium, France and Denmark are planning limits, in some cases for up to seven years. Only Ireland and Spain have said they will keep their borders open.

Germany, with its high unemployment and generous welfare system, insisted in 2002 during entry negotiations for the new candidate countries on a clause that would allow it to impose restrictions to its market for citizens from central and eastern Europe until 2011.

Second-class citizens?

Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic will become official members of the EU in May of this year. In the past months, tension between current and future members of the EU has increased on a number of issues.

The about-turns on work policy are likely to deepen the fear among many in the accession countries that they will be treated as second-class European citizens.

“The thinking that we need long transition periods 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall shows a lack of solidarity,” Jan Figiel, Slovakia’s candidate for the European Commission, told Reuters.

The new members point to one of the fundaments of the EU project—free movement of persons including the right to live and work in another member state.

But as the EU prepares to take in 75 million new people, mostly from countries formerly part of the Soviet bloc where wages were lower, fears have been growing of an influx of labor in search of a better standard of living. The unease has been especially strong in Germany, which, since 1990, has attracted about 75 percent of the migrants to the EU from application countries.

Unfounded Fears

Experts, however, note that history teaches that such fears have generally been without foundation. In previous EU enlargement periods, such as Greece in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986, transitional measures such as labor restrictions were put into place, largely unnecessarily.

Other alarms about east-west migration have proven false. One example is a 1989 study by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees which estimated that 25 million people from the eastern Europe would move to the west in the 1990s. In the end, fewer than one-tenth that number did so.