Economic: Immigration, Jobs and Polish Plumbers
Polish Plumbers: Handsome and Good for the Economy?
From the BBC: The “Polish Plumber” was the catch-phrase of the French “Non” referendum on the constitution, and later became a tongue-in-cheek slogan for the Polish tourist board.
Out of all the arguments against immigration, economic fears - from “natives” losing their jobs to wage depression - seems like one of the more reasonable “anti” arguments, especially when compared other arguments that touch on racism and xenophobia.
Thanks to the recent EU Enlargement, the world had a chance to have a sample lab on immigration: 1) England, Ireland and Sweden who let in EU Central/Eastern Europeans 2) The rest of the EU, fearing “Polish Plumbers”, did not
Via Virginia Postrel, Thomas Fuller of IHT reports on the results so far of the experiment:
It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.
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.
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