Speaking in the House of Commons, British Home Secretary David Blunkett said that citizens of these states, who under current EU rules will henceforth be able to settle freely in any of the Union's 25 countries, will for at least two years be deprived of the right to receive social benefits. Moreover, they will lose the right to reside in Britain if they prove unable to support themselves, and in that case they will have to return home.
This is how London intends to combat the phenomenon that Blunkett called social tourism. From a technical point of view, control will be ensured through a special register in which data on the place of work of new arrivals and on the employer will be recorded.
It cannot be said that the decisions taken by London and Dublin were truly unexpected. Britain and Ireland remained among the few old EU members that had not negotiated for themselves during the talks with candidate states a special transition period of up to seven years to protect their labor markets from a possible influx of workers. Germany, France, Italy and Austria, for example, did so, and obtained the right to limit and regulate this influx.
The introduction by London and Dublin of restrictive measures - incidentally, far more liberal than those of their partners - or even half-measures, as the opposition calls them, was the result of a wave of panic moods that gripped part of society. These fears, revived in recent months, are seriously worrying the European Commission, which considers them largely unfounded.
In Brussels, they believe that these sentiments were largely the result of the lack of serious public discussion of the problems related to EU enlargement and of explanatory work by political circles. Speaking in the European Parliament, European Commission member Günter Verheugen said: "We cannot close our eyes to the fact that only now, at the eleventh hour, has a genuine discussion about EU enlargement begun, and this topic has taken first place both on newspaper pages and in people's minds."
How well-founded are all the panic forecasts in reality? A number of serious studies indicate that they are greatly exaggerated.
According to a recently published report prepared by the European Commission and the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, even if all restrictions were lifted within the next five years, the migration flow from the ten new countries would amount in total to about 1% of the EU's working-age population, which has 25 members - that is approximately 220,000 immigrants per year. Let us recall that the total population of the European Union will be 450 million after May 1. For comparison: currently, one and a half million immigrants from third countries arrive in the EU every year.
Moreover, experience shows that after the admission of new members, the flow of immigrants from them tends to decrease rather than increase. An example is Spain, which upon joining the EU had a gap in living standards with the leading countries of the Union comparable to that existing now, say, in Slovakia. The number of immigrants from Spain fell from 120,000 at the time of its application to join the EU in the late 1970s to two or three thousand after its admission.
The same study showed that increased immigration from Central and Eastern European countries could, on the contrary, prove beneficial for the EU. According to its authors, between 2 and 3% of young people aged 15 to 24 in these countries express a desire to immigrate. A third of them are students, a quarter have higher education. The new member countries will bring us highly qualified human resources, believes European Commission member Margot Wallström.
At the same time, a report appeared from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It shows that the influx of immigrants to the EU from the 10 new member countries is generally tending to decline. Thus, in 2003 it decreased by 22% compared with the previous year.
Finally, supporters of lifting restrictions offer another argument: this is not the first wave of fears inflated by Eurosceptics. In 1986, the same was said about the supposed catastrophic influx of immigrants from Portugal and Spain, which joined the EU that year. A seven-year transition period for the free movement of labor was introduced then. However, the improvement in the economic situation of these two countries proved so rapid that all restrictive measures were lifted before it ended.