Britain turns into the melting pot of 21st century Europe

NEW LABOUR: immigrants at work in a central London street

Prashant Sood

The migration of nearly 600,000 workers from eastern Europe into the United Kingdom in the last two years has led to an animated debate but not to angry reaction from the public. There are concerns about cities getting overcrowded and civic infrastructure coming under strain but the dialogue has been largely civilised so far.

Has British society come to terms with the inevitability of immigration for running its public services, farms and shops? Or is it a grudging acceptance of a reality made less painful because the mass migration is “white”?
         
Questions about integration, race, multiculturalism and Britishness are prominent in public discourse at present  while at the same time, following 7/7, efforts have been stepped up to isolate any radical Muslim group preaching sectarianism. 
       
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent comments about Britain not having any place for hate-mongers were made in the context of Muslim extremism associated with “a minority” of the country’s Muslim community.  He linked the right to be in a multi-cultural society with a duty to integrate and be part of Britain.
       
Mr Blair went on to praise the present Conservative party leadership for its contribution to a mature debate on immigration and hoped that such exchange of thought would never turn into an attack on immigrants. 
    
The Labour Party, which has been in power for the last nine years, has responded to public fears about growing pressure on civic amenities by reorienting its earlier open door policy to one of “managed and controlled migration.”    

Britain has seen one of the largest waves of migration in its history in the last two years with an estimated 600,000 people arriving to work here from the 10 countries that joined the European Union in May 2004.  Of these, 427,000 persons applied between May 2004 and June 2006 under the government’s Workers Registration Scheme while others were self-employed.
       
It is clear the Home Office grossly underestimated arrivals from eastern Europe, putting the number at 13,000 a year even though Britain was one of the only three countries in Europe to allow free access to its labour market after the expansion of the EU.  Migration from EU countries to the UK is in addition to that from other parts of the world. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) 582,000 persons migrated to the UK in 2004 and 565,000 in 2005.

Estimated emigration out of the UK in 2004 was 360,000 and 380,000 in 2005.

Within this number, the net emigration of Britons has grown very rapidly over the past decade, from 17,000 in 1994 to 120,000 in 2004.

New measures

To assess the impact of the inflow of people from eastern Europe, the government has decided to set up a Migration Advisory Committee which will suggest ways to balance “migration with economy” and compile the latest information on how immigration is affecting the labour market. Simultaneously, it has taken steps to overcome skill shortages in Britain by pumping extra money into schools, colleges and universities.
       
The government’s moves to control immigration from countries outside the European Economic Area (all 25 EU member states along with Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway) by introducing a points-based system, have not found favour with organisations working for ethnic communities.
        
Mr Habib Rahman, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), a non-governmental organisation, says the points-based system works against people from the developing countries in search of low-paid jobs in Britain. He disagrees with the provisions that entail giving preference in jobs to candidates from the EU and says the best talent should be hired irrespective of nationality. 
                                                                                                                        
Estimates drawn up by the JCWI suggest that there are nearly 500,000 people living and working in the UK without proper documents.  “A part of any serious managed migration policy is to give rights to the irregular migrant population which is making a positive contribution to British society,” Mr Rahman says.        
        
The scale of the problem is reflected by lack of space in Britain’s detention centres where many would-be illegal immigrants are held. Violence has erupted twice in the last two years at Harmondsworth, the country’s biggest detention centre.                                                                                                                       
         
Mr Rahman believes that “obstacles” to the entry of workers from the developing world into Britain should be removed because the remittances they send home contribute to alleviating poverty. “Often human trafficking goes up if the rules are very strict,” he says.  He also claims that the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) leads to a brain drain from developing countries.
         
Crucially, he feels the reason why UK citizens have adjusted to large scale migration from eastern Europe is that the newcomers are racially indistinguishable. “If black people had come in such numbers there would have been riots in the street. That’s the reality,” he says.        

Mr Danny Sriskandarajah, Head of Migration, Equalities and Citizenship at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a left of centre think-tank, says that there isgrowing emphasis on free trade in the world but little talk of free movement of workers.  He, too, feels that the debate on immigration is fairly decent because most of those coming in are white and Christians. “The debate would have been much, much worse if this was not the case,” he says.           

Most of the new arrivals in the UK are from Poland, where average annual income at £4,700 is a third of Britain’s. The migrants have taken sundry jobs all over the country, sometimes at wages less than the prescribed minimum. Having a strong work ethic, they generally make efforts to pick up English quickly even if by joining language classes. They have been easily accepted by employers.
                    
Natalia, 31, who is from east Poland, has been working as a cleaner since she arrived in London two years ago. She lives with two other Polish girls who arrived later.  Earning £40 a day, she has not yet decided whether to settle down in London or go back. “I am looking for a husband. If I get my partner here in two years, than I may stay, otherwise I will go to Poland,” she says.
        
Jaroslav Cabla, 22, came to London from Zlin in the Czech Republic three years back and got a job as a receptionist at a guest house. Although an electrician by training, he cannot work in his trade in the UK unless he passes extra examinations. His present job gives him more than twice the money that he could have hoped for in his country. “I save money and use it to repay instalments on the flat I bought back home,” he says.                                                                                                                        
       
While the first wave of arrivals from eastern Europe have been lucky in getting free access to the labour market in Britain, this will not be the case with those from Bulgaria and Romania, the next two entrants to the EU.
        
Low-skilled workers from these countries will be restricted to existing quota schemes in the agriculture and food-processing sectors with an upper limit of 20,000 and a right to work for six months.  Skilled workers from Bulgaria and Romania will have to get a work permit or qualify under HSMP.

Economic rationale

Net migration to Britain tripled in the first seven years of Labour party rule. To fulfil its promise of cutting hospital waiting lists, the government recruited some 70,000  doctors and nurses, according to Mr Danny Sriskandarajah, of the IPPR, many of them from outside Britain. It has also encouraged foreign students to study in Britain as a means of financing higher education.       
        
The Labour Party has not been in favour of setting an upper limit to immigration.   The Conservatives want an annual limit on the number of economic migrants, especially from non-EEA countries. Having faced attacks for their hardline stance on immigration in the last election, the Conservatives have slightly softened their position saying that asylum policy should be separated from policy on economic migration.
                                                                                                                    
A paper named `Controlling Economic Migration’, drawn up jointly by Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green, suggests creating a special border force which would take over duty from the police for enforcing immigration laws.

Migration Watch, an anti-immigration pressure group, favours achieving a position where the number of people entering Britain will be equal to the number emigrating. Britain, it says, has historically been a nation of emigrants and not immigrants and the migration into Britain, which largely began in the1950s from Commonwealth countries, was counterbalanced by emigration till 1983 when the net inflow began to grow steadily.

It says that the total output of the economy may rise faster as a result of immigration, but output per head rises significantly less fast because the new workers add to population growth.
        
Migration Watch believes that of the projected population growth of 7.2 million by 2031, six million (83 per cent) will be due to immigration at an assumed level of 145,000 a year. This will lead to a requirement for over 1.5 million houses by 2026.
      
Those supporting the free movement of labour say that in a global economy where competitiveness is the key, it has helped British companies to compete with those in the emerging economies of Asia. Most of the migrants from the EU are in the 18-35 age group which helps offset problems associated with an ageing population. They say that migration has helped British workers to move to better paying jobs and has kept inflation down.
         
Nearly 15 per cent of economic growth has been attributed to immigrants. In 2005, nearly 43 per cent of migrants came to the UK from Europe while 14 per cent came from the Indian subcontinent.

Mr Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, who believes there is a good economic rationale for immigration, says there is a need to simplify procedures for people wanting work in the UK  “There is a need to curtail long queues,” he says. However, he too feels that the situation would have been “very different” if the present large immigration to the UK was not of white extraction. 
          
Stories in the media about the changing ethnic profile of some cities including London have led to concerns about a “dilution of Britishness.” The government has announced that from April 2, 2007 those wanting an open-ended visa must pass a test proving they understand the country and the English language.                                                                                              
         
Life expectancy has grown by 4.8 years for men and 3.4 years for women in Britain in the last 22 years.  Despite the projected annual population growth rate of 0.42 per cent, support for older people is expected to diminish.

0NS estimates that against 3.33 people of working age for every person of pensionable age in 2004, the ratio will fall to 2.62 by 2031. Already, a great deal of the care for elderly people is provided by immigrant workers. It could just be that in the next few decades, older British citizens will migrate to exotic places in the third world in search of affordable day care.