When I first arrived in Britain, to complete my education at a Scottish university, I thought I would only stay three years. After all, mutual recognition of degrees among the (then) 12 European Union member states meant my qualification would be recognised back home in Italy. But then I found a job, and after that a better job, in the field I wanted to work in. Eventually I bought a place and married a Briton.
Twenty-five years later here I still am, still enjoying living in this country except for one thing. While I used to think of myself as an EU citizen, now, because of the increasingly hostile debate about the EU in this country, I feel like an immigrant – a word dripping with all sorts of negative connotations.
So are my fellow EU immigrants and I such a huge burden to this country? Every major report on the subject – be it from the European commission, the Oganisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the Office for Budget Responsibility – has said that migrants pay more into the United Kingdom economy than they take out in benefits and public services (34 per cent more, to be exact).
This is because, contrary to popular belief, we are not all scrabbling on the minimum wage, unfairly competing with natives for unskilled jobs. The NHS, one of the biggest employers in the world, relies hugely on EU migration: 11 per cent of all staff in the NHS are not UK nationals, a figure that rises to 26 per cent when looking at doctors only. Among the top 10 exporters of NHS staff, five are EU countries: Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Germany.
EU migrants are generally young (85 per cent of migrants from eastern Europe are under 40), well-educated (more EU migrants than Britons have university degrees), and serious about their job-seeking efforts (EU migrants are 45 per cent less likely to claim benefits than Britons).
And not all are here to work, of course. In 2012-13, 125,000 students from across the EU followed in my footsteps and came to the UK to study. This is good for UK universities, which make a lot of money from EU students, and good for society at large, as many with desirable skills and knowledge will go on to make a significant contribution in this country in fields like science and technology, boosting innovation.
EU freedom of movement is, of course, a two-way street: UK citizens also travel to other EU countries to study, to work, and to retire.
Thousands of UK students benefit every year from the Erasmus programme, which offers grants to study elsewhere in the EU. 14,572 Brits took advantage of that in 2013/14. More generally, according to government estimates nearly two million Brits live elsewhere in the EU, which is nearly the same amount of EU migrants living in Britain.
In the past few months Ukip’s surge has caused a lot of handwringing on EU immigration and plenty of policy-based evidence making. But we have seen painfully little in the way of leadership from the mainstream parties on the issues that really make people worried and unsecure, apart from a few commendable exceptions such as the shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna, a man who has seen up close the ugliness that derives from anti-immigration rhetoric when it’s left unchecked.
There is a lot we could and should do to address people’s concerns when they are based on evidence – before we pull up the drawbridge at the risk of shutting ourselves out of the EU.
We should deal with the real problems caused by underplanning, tight resources and services being under pressure. We should come down hard on gangmasters who exploit low-paid workers, whether native or immigrant. We can keep better track of people’s movements and therefore adequately prepare so there is not an undue pressure on public services. Exit controls or registration requirements exist in other countries and could be used in Britain too. Benefit entitlements can be tightened and deliberate abuse – minuscule though it is by all accounts – can be stamped down on.
What we should not do is offer a potentially catastrophic solution to a largely imaginary problem, while the sources of the real hardship, insecurity and unfairness remain largely untackled.
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Paola Buonadonna is media director at British Influence
Brilliant article which makes me embarrassed to be a Brit. One irony is that an objective of the Single Market was to achieve labour mobility so that we could compete better with the US. Now, because of poor planning in areas like housing we have turned the UK success at attracting talented people into an artificial problem to be exploited by little-Englanders.
Well said. An excellent article.
My wife is an immigrant who works in the NHS and I myself have worked abroad in the EU. But while I’m sympathetic to many of the arguments in this article, I think the scale of immigration is just too high. England just seems to get busier and busier and more covered in urban sprawl.
We should adopt a points system but allow students from the EU in. They can have extra points for having studied in the UK. The recent City Growth Commission report suggests allowing cities to issue visas, which seems like a good way to tackle local skill shortages http://www.citygrowthcommission.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/City-Growth-Commission-Final-Report.pdf
Well said – full of facts. I am a Brit who (currently) lives in Britain, and I personally benefit hugely from the effect of immigration on our economy. Ed Miliband is right to address this issue up front, but David Aaronovitch is also right – our answers to those concerned about immigration should include all the Paola Buonadonna arguments and not simply fall into the ‘immigration is bad’ hole. We should not to try out-UKIP UKIP.
It’s simply numbers. What should the maximum be?
Immigration is always difficult to debate in a rational manner because underpinning much of the hostility to immigration is actually hostility to (some) immigrants. The xenophobes and racists, closet or otherwise, drive the debate and offer simplistic solutions which have a much wider appeal, particularly in times of economic stress. It makes much more sense for the Left, as Paola says, to address the underlying causes of discontent – economic insecurity, inequality, housing, etc. People in well-paid, secure jobs are much harder to persuade of the case for elevating immigration to its present heights as a political issue. Xenophobes and racists are always with us, they just have far less impact in economic good times – people are much less interested in finding scapegoats when there’s not much to complain about. So policy should focus on promoting real economic growth, reducing inequality, etc, rather than on reducing the deficit through austerity – the failed politics of despair. Labour should take the opportunity offered by the rise in the deficit to declare austerity dead and set out a clear, optimistic, alternative – the politics of hope and aspiration. All the time Ed Balls goes on about spending cuts, he effectively confirms that we’re all the same.