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| Europe | ||
| Europe's great (im)migration | ||
| 2005-10-22 | ||
Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year. They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English. But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace. Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades. Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction. "They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future." In fact, Britain is so eager to recruit more Poles, by far the largest group of entrants since May last year, that British embassy officials in Warsaw have distributed brochures at Polish unemployment offices "so that if people wanted to go to the United Kingdom they had good information," Thompson said. One surprising source of tolerance has been the British tabloids, which last year ran headlines warning of a Slavic invasion. Now, at least one newspaper, The Daily Mail, is castigating lazy Britons instead. This year, the paper lamented the "dependency culture" of some Britons who rely on unemployment and disability programs, going so far as to ask why the Scots couldn't be more like the Poles. "The Poles are terrific people and foreign workers tend to work a lot harder than the Scots," the newspaper quoted a Scottish employer saying. In cultural terms, the migration has reinvigorated Britain's aging Polish community. British statistics show that the workers are disproportionately young - 82 percent are aged 18 to 34 - and willing to travel to both urban and rural workplaces. "Accession workers are continuing to go where the work is, helping to fill gaps in our labor market," said a report by the Home Office released in August. Podhorodecka, who emigrated to Britain several decades ago, guesses that 80 percent of the newcomers will settle permanently in Britain, and worries about the consequences for her homeland. "It's an appalling situation for Poland," she said. "The country is educating these people and they are leaving to work on building sites. Poland does not need to be left with the unemployable." Sometimes well-qualified arriving workers take "any sort of job" to improve their English and adjust to life in Britain, then go on to work in their profession, said Jan Mokrzycki, chairman of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain. At the Polish cultural center in Hammersmith, a tall, blond Pole with a master's degree in engineering said he worked at building sites doing manual labor for about £900 a month. That is still five times more than what he would earn in Warsaw, said the man, who gave his name as Rafal.
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 The Anglosphere has always been more assimilationist than the continent, not that that's saying much. This is a pleasant non-surprise. |
| Posted by: Phemp Glemp1339 2005-10-22 22:19 |
| #2 Here's hoping that the example being set by Polish immigrants impresses upon the Britons just how vital cultural assimilation is. Little heed seems to have been paid to this as yet and recently the very dear cost of such inattentiveness was made quite clear. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2005-10-22 19:57 |
| #1 Did you know 50% of the UKs AIDS cases are "imports"? |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2005-10-22 10:33 |