The new cross-departmental home affairs select committee report on the recent work of the immigration directorate does not pull its punches. It suggests that the government has fuelled anti-immigrant prejudice by not producing estimates of the likely scale of new migration flows from Romania and Bulgaria following the lifting of controls on their working rights at the beginning of the year, while simultaneously dismissing the high predictions made by Migration Watch and others with the comment that there appears to have been a ‘trickle’ rather than a ‘flood’ of arrivals from these countries so far in 2014.
This is hardly surprising. As IPPR and others argued, the situation this time was very different than a decade previously, when the UK was one of only three European countries to open its borders fully to the eight new states that joined the EU in 2004. In contrast, Romanians and Bulgarians have been able to move to the UK for work or study since 2007. The statistics show that significant numbers have done so, and that a considerable proportion of these have already returned home or moved elsewhere.
It is not self-evident that a firm estimate of the numbers would have eased public concerns or prevented the most alarmist coverage of the end of transitional controls. It is notoriously difficult to predict European migration flows, as the previous government discovered to its cost when it suggested that fewer than 15,000 people from Poland and the other 2004 accession states would come to the UK on an annual basis. This turned out to be a massive underestimate, and has hampered Labour in its subsequent efforts to break away from the Conservative party’s focus on reducing net migration at any cost. It also reduced public trust in all political parties’ ability to manage migration effectively.
However, the committee’s report does highlight other mistakes that were made by the government at the end of 2013. The scale and pace of immigration to the UK matters, and housing and key public services can be put under pressure when population growth rates increase rapidly over a short space of time. Yet instead of putting in place systems to quickly identify and address these impacts if and when they occurred, the focus instead was on policies designed to reduce the incidence of ‘benefit tourism’, a phenomenon that the government has failed to provide clear evidence of. This stoked public fears unnecessarily, and sidestepped more important questions about how local authorities can be supported to deliver high-quality services to all their residents, including new migrants and more established communities.
Most European migrants move to other EU countries to work, study or set up businesses, rather than to live off the welfare systems of other states. This is what the system of free movement was designed to achieve, and the evidence suggests that it is generally working well. Intra-EU mobility has alleviated pressures in countries experiencing economic difficulties, and compensated for gaps and skill shortages in others. Before the Seasonal Agricultural Work Scheme was scrapped at the end of 2013, Romanian and Bulgarian workers filled many vacancies in the UK’s agricultural and horticultural industries, while many more work as doctors and skilled clinical staff in the NHS.
This is not to suggest that free movement is an unqualified good. Over the last 10 years, the expansion of the EU and the crisis in the eurozone has changed the nature of European migration flows in significant ways. States like Germany, the UK and the Netherlands have received larger numbers of immigrants than expected – including more recently from Spain, Italy and other ‘old’ EU countries that are experiencing high levels of unemployment. Issues with the compatibility of educational and training credentials mean that many EU migrants end up working below their qualification level or in precarious forms of self-employment. And the movement of people who only intend to live and work in another country for a few years before returning home has created population churn and rapid changes in communities, exacerbated by a lack of focus on the integration of EU migrants.
There is appetite in many European states to make free movement work more predictably and fairly. Rather than spending time and energy on implementing unilateral measures to reduce the apparently minimal incidence of benefit tourism, the UK government should be working with partners to develop a positive reform agenda that would address these challenges in a meaningful way. As the report makes clear, failure to do so will only increase anti-immigrant sentiment – an outcome no one wants.
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Alex Glennie is senior research fellow at IPPR
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