Experts calm immigration fears

Date: 16/07/1998

By Mark Turner

AUSTRIAN and German fears that a huge influx of low-paid migrants from central and eastern Europe could follow EU enlargement are vastly overblown, according to immigration experts.

Nevertheless, there are indications that short-term (and often illegal) migration could increase and that a growing number of people from the former Soviet Union will use the Union's eastern fringes as a transit point into the West.

The forecasting of future immigration patterns has become a highly sensitive exercise as politicians in Vienna and Bonn call for long transition periods before the right to free movement of workers within the EU is extended to central and eastern Europeans in the accession states.

Austrian Prime Minister Viktor Klima, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and challenger Gerhard Schröder have all demanded restrictions for another five to ten years, or at least until wages in the East increase substantially.

But migration expert Peter Fischer from the University of Bundeswehr, Hamburg, claims that "mass migration is very unlikely to occur", adding that "EU membership will rather decrease such probabilities than increase them".

In a recent paper on immigration from the Baltic States, Fischer says that once a country has reached a minimum wealth level (around 4,000 ecu per capita) the cost of moving quickly overtakes that of staying put. Furthermore, he claims that migration is determined far more by western demand than eastern supply, and that the EU already suffers from an excess of low-skilled workers.

"The implicit basis of western European fears of mass migration provides the assumption that people move whenever there are relatively large wage gaps between two countries and migration is free," states Fischer. "Without further qualification, this assumption is wrong."

He likens current fears to the early 1980s when northern Europeans worried that Greek, Portuguese and Spanish accession would lead to destabilising population movements and put them out of jobs.

"What happened in 1987 to 1992 after the new southern EU members were granted free mobility? There was certainly no mass migration into other EU countries," he says, pointing out that, in fact, emigration declined despite high unemployment.

"Southern European labourers prefer to stay in lesser-paying jobs or even unemployed in their home area rather than to leave and search for a job in a central European member country."

There is, however, evidence to suggest that Germany and Austria could see more short-term migration by, for example, eastern Europeans living within commuting range of their major cities.

A new study by Waalters, Kirchen and Dietz, which assumes that eastern European countries join the EU with the right to free movement in 2005, predicts that Austria would need to cope with 47,000 new workers a year, of which almost 26,000 would remain based in the East. It adds that transition periods of ten years would reduce that number by 32%.

Experts from the International Centre for Migration Policy Development say that studies for Germany indicate a similar pattern, and add that interviews with people in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic suggest that up to 700,000 people might contemplate moving westwards if there were no controls.

John Salt, of University College London, believes that "in the long run" labour movement from further east "may well increase unemployment amongst other migrants, and then ordinary Austrians".

Salt is keen, however, to draw a clear distinction between different types of migration which are currently often seen as parts of one homogeneous phenomenon. The reasons for temporary, permanent, transitory, illegal and formal movements can be quite different, he argues, and are influenced in different ways.

Much of the migration which will occur over the next 20 years would happen anyway, with or without formal restrictions, continuing a trend (albeit declining and smaller than expected) which started with the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The general rule is that Europeans prefer to stay where they are, due to language, family ties and knowledge that has local rather than international value.