Free to come and go

Free to come and go

YOU see them on the London Tube, groups of tall, fair men dressed in overalls, probably just off a building site and speaking their mysterious language. They - and their women compatriots - work machines, cook pizza, clean the homes of the middle class and fill countless other largely thankless but vital jobs. They are part of Britain's huge influx of Eastern Europeans, predominantly Poles.

Every day scores of young Poles gather inside a newsagent in Hammersmith, London. They scribble down job notices, often applying for work that pays less than the minimum wage of £5 ($12) an hour because it is still a lot higher than in Poland, where unemployment is 17 per cent. The newsagent's window was known all over Poland as the Sciana Placzu, or Wailing Wall, until the council last year forced the owner to stop putting notices in the window because such a crush of people was blocking the street.

These young Poles are not a traditional migration story. Few plan to stay in Britain. They want to work hard for a few years, make some money, then go home. In that respect they may embody the future of global migration.


When eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union in May 2004, the 15 old member states could choose either to allow the new countries' workers to join their workforce or to delay their entry for up to seven years. France, afraid of an invasion of low-wage workers when unemployment was 10 per cent, chose delay. The feared arrival of the mythical "Polish plumber" was a big subject in French politics last year. In Britain, on the other hand, the Polish plumber has landed, among more than 200,000 Eastern Europeans in the past 20 months, and few have noticed.

Here you have two pictures of modern migration. One is Fortress Europe, where in some countries immigration has dwindled to a trickle. The other is Britain, which is experiencing a huge human turnover. In 2004 nearly 500,000 non-British migrants arrived and more than 200,000 Britons left. Both figures were records.

It isn't that Britain is suddenly a migrants' paradise; many newcomers work long hours for lousy pay. But its mix of new settlers and temporary workers, the hundreds of thousands of mainly young people who help make London so lively, suggests Britain may be on the way to creating a new kind of economy, based on the free movement not only of goods but of people.

It sounds unthinkable, and it is certainly far off. But if a report published in Britain late last year is right, the nature of immigration to the West is shifting substantially, and it is not in the direction of putting up more walls.

The report, Migration: A Welcome Opportunity, by a group of economists, business people and academics who comprise the Migration Commission of the Royal Society of the Arts, makes an economic and intellectual case for liberalising migration.

It seeks to address a set of interconnected problems. One, the West increasingly needs labour but governments are timid about supporting immigration for fear of a voter backlash. Two, illegal immigration seems unstoppable. Despite all sorts of well-publicised crackdowns, Britain has up to 500,000 illegal migrants, on official figures. Three, illegal migrants face severe exploitation, often because, being illegal, they have no protection.

The commission's answer is to legalise it. Allow people to move freely for work, within some limits, but also require them to go home. Use the huge sums spent on border control to ensure protections for low-paid migrants. And make migration a tool of global policy, "to restructure the world economy in favour of the world's poor".

In recent years many Western countries, including Australia, have geared their migration programs to skilled workers. But the commission says that situation cannot last.

In four sectors of the British economy - agriculture, construction, hospitality and health - it is already an "entirely utopian" hope that unskilled jobs could be filled without migrant workers. That is because of an apparent paradox: high-skilled economies generate a lot of low-skilled work. Think of the hospital orderlies, hotel staff, waiters, labourers and cleaners needed in a modern service economy.

These jobs have two significant characteristics: unlike factory work, they cannot be exported to China; and in Britain and elsewhere, the increasingly well-educated local-born citizens no longer want to do them.

As populations age, worker shortages will increase, so much so, the report argues, that Britain will soon have to look further afield than Eastern Europe for its workers. For poor countries, that is good and bad. On the one hand, migrants send huge amounts of money home. On official figures, remittances from migrants in wealthy countries are worth $US150 billion ($200 billion) a year to poor countries, roughly twice the level of official aid.

The World Bank says remittances to Moldova, which has up to 600,000 people, or 20 to 30 per cent of its working population, employed abroad, are helping to lift the country out of poverty. The Bank of Mexico estimates that remittances, mostly from the US, reduced the number of Mexico's poor by 3 million between 2000 and 2002.

Yet emigration also has a downside for poor countries. In Ghana, where one in 10 children dies before the age of five, about 80 per cent of trained nurses work in Britain. Tiny Swaziland, where one in five people has AIDS, trained 200 nurses last year; 150 of them work in Britain.

The report argues that this contradiction can be solved, through new forms of temporary migration. Under one scenario, workers could enter a country for two years then have to return home, for six months or a year, before being allowed to apply for another work visa. That doesn't necessarily mean settlement programs, which have built postwar Australia, would be abolished, but they would be part of an expanded migration scheme. The report says the goal is to create a circular flow of people: if you like, to make the Australian backpacker doing two years' work in London a global model.

Is this realistic? Wouldn't temporary migrants all want to stay in their new countries? Not necessarily. The report says temporary migration is the norm around the world: millions of Asian workers move for seasonal labour each year before returning home. And when Greece and Spain joined the EU (in 1981 and 1986), it was widely assumed their workers would flood northern Europe. The opposite happened: as the economies in those countries took off, in part aided by EU funds, emigrant workers went home.

The report even argues that tougher immigration policies can have the effect of stopping migrants returning home, for fear they will never get back to the country they migrated to. In the 1980s illegal Mexican workers stayed an average of only three years in the US. In the late 1990s, after the border had been fortified, they stayed an average of nine years. Up to 11 million illegal immigrants have entered the US in the past 20 years, despite thousands of deaths on the journey from Mexico and huge sums of money spent on border control. Now Congress is considering building a wall along the Mexican frontier. But business says it needs labour and President George Bush is pushing for a program of temporary migration.

Italy and Spain, where birthrates are plummeting and worker shortages are emerging, have also embraced large temporary migration programs for unskilled workers. Women, who now number 50 per cent of the world's migrants, are in huge demand, especially in the health and aged-care sectors in Western countries with ageing populations.

Australia is one of the few OECD countries not to have an unskilled-labour program. But Australian farmers are crying out for seasonal labour. In October Pacific island states confronted the Prime Minister, John Howard, over Australia's refusal to grant season labour permits to island workers. They said it was unfair that young people from wealthy countries could work temporarily in Australia under the working holiday scheme while their own youth, who face high unemployment at home, could not.

To the Migration Commission, these are all signs of what is to come. Some of its members say governments will have to "introduce externally the same migratory system that prevails internally: unhampered movement". They agree it sounds "hopelessly utopian", then add wryly, "as present levels of trade or capital liberalisation appeared in, say, 1950".

It certainly sounds utopian that governments would relinquish the right to determine who enters their countries. Still, profound changes to global migration seem not only inevitable but imminent, at least when seen from London, where old ideas of national workforces, citizens and foreigners, who's in and who's out, are beginning to dissolve.

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