Word: irelands
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...European Union's then 15 countries, only three - Ireland, Britain and Sweden - agreed to open their labor markets in May 2004. Though East Europeans have settled everywhere from Scandinavia to Spain, the most evident result of the decisions taken on enlargement has been a concentrated flow of Poles into Britain and Ireland. And although politicians and media in those countries warned that an influx of workers from Eastern Europe would undermine local economies, steal jobs and bankrupt the welfare system, the impact has been quite different. Polish migrants like Chudzicka have integrated seamlessly: 75%, in one survey, said the Irish...
Well they might, for there is no evidence that incoming workers have systematically displaced locals or stolen their jobs. Unemployment is higher in France, from which Poles were turned away, than in Britain where they were welcomed. The jobless rate in Ireland is just 4.5%, and job vacancy rates reported by Irish businesses in the past two years have actually risen, from 11% to 17%. The positions migrants are filling, economists say, are either ones that locals don't want, or new positions altogether. In fact, the infusion of educated labor drove growth in host countries' most dynamic sectors. Chudzicka...
...east, the toughest question facing its older members is whether to open labor markets. Among ordinary Europeans, opposition to enlargement has focused on the fear of losing jobs and the impact on expensive social welfare systems. (Despite their positive experience with Poland and other Eastern countries, both Britain and Ireland decided to maintain labor restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria for the time being.) For the moment, countries such as Germany and France are maintaining restrictions on labor from new member states - E.U. law permits them to do so until 2011 - but some experts are beginning to question the wisdom...
...Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have decided to follow suit and open their markets to the eight new members from Eastern and Central Europe who joined the E.U. in 2004. France, too, has eased some restrictions. All would do well to study the details of how Britain and Ireland coped. While granting admission to all workers, both nations restricted migrants' access to welfare, thus pre-empting claims that folks were coming as "welfare tourists" to leech off the system. At the same time, most of the new migrants are single, which means that more people are paying taxes into...
...Dublin realized from the start just how many Poles and other East Europeans intended to migrate, they might not have opened their markets in the first place. Government economists in Britain had expected no more than 15,000 migrant laborers each year from the new E.U. countries; in Ireland 10,000 were predicted. In fact, 579,000 came to Britain in the first two years, more than one-half of them from Poland, and over 300,000 from Eastern Europe to Ireland. Low-cost flights to Dublin from Katowice, Cracow and Wroclaw were jammed for months. Newspapers sprang...