Published: 22 February 2013
Region: Europe
Nine countries, members of the European Union, will lift their labour market restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian citizens from 1 January 2014 as the seven-year transition period since the two countries joined runs out.
From the beginning of the next year, citizens of Romania and Bulgaria will have all the rights to live and work in the EU that two countries have joined in 2007.
Great Britain is one of the countries along with Germany and France which will be relaxing the restrictions imposed after the last EU enlargement. Ahead of lifting the ban, British media has started to speculate on the number of migrants who would come to live and work in the UK, as well as on the consequences of their arrival for the country’s economy.
The figures circulating in the British media go from 250,000 Bulgarians and Romanians ‘to head to UK’ as in the Telegraph to 29 million as predicted by Daily Mail.
A majority of the British media published the conclusions of Migration Watch UK, a London think tank. Since the UK government didn’t disclose any official estimates on the number of migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, Migration Watch UK published its prognosis of 250,000 people coming from the two EU countries by 2019.
However, “there is no purely statistical basis on which one could estimate the likely future flows of migration from Romania and Bulgaria. It is a matter of judgment, based on the precedents like the case of Poland, Italy” and, as the London think tank says in its report, “Roma Factor”. So “the number could be considerably higher” because of the Roma movement, concludes Migration Watch UK.
Not only that the British newspapers play with the numbers, but they publish the reports on Roma community in Romania and Bulgaria in the context of danger for the labour market in the UK. As UK tabloids write about ‘gypsies that can hardly wait’ to come to Britain, officials from the two EU countries warn of ‘risks of racial attacks on Eastern Europeans’.
To the opposite of numerous articles spreading fear and giving negative prognosis for the British economy when the restrictions become relaxed, the Guardian run a story on migrants who are seasonal workers hinting that Britain is in need for the work force from abroad.
“But the MPs are concerned that there might not be any British strawberries in the shops for Wimbledon fortnight next year without the insurance of temporary migrants under a reopened scheme – 60,000 Bulgarians and Romanians have been coming to work in Britain under such temporary work schemes every year since 2007”, writes the Guardian.
Even though the global economic crisis has brought high unemployment rates in the UK, the country is still short of several professions and it relies on the immigration for that. An example can be found in the Shortage Occupations List published by UK Border Agency. UK, for instance needs more social workers, medical practitioners, nurses, chemical engineers, dancers and musicians.
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