Word: migrant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Poles away, than in Britain, where they were welcomed. The jobless rate in Ireland is just 4.5%; job-vacancy rates in some sectors rose in the past two years, to 17%. Over the past two years, according to an estimate by the Dublin-based Economic and Social Research Institute, migrant workers have added 2 percentage points to Ireland's gdp. And in December, citing increased migration to Britain, the British treasury raised its gdp growth estimate for the next five years, to 2.75% from 2.5%. "It's been a fantastic success story," said Jonathan Byrne, a senior executive...
...London and Dublin realized from the start just how many people intended to migrate, they might not have opened their markets in the first place. Britain had expected no more than 15,000 migrant laborers each year from the new E.U. countries; in Ireland 10,000 were predicted. While granting admission to all workers, both nations restricted migrants' access to welfare, thus pre-empting "welfare tourists" from leeching off the system...
That work ethic is being applied by young migrant workers--82% of the new East European workers in Britain are between 18 and 34--even if it means swapping desk jobs for building sites. Take Robert Domanski, 29, a law graduate from Warsaw University. In 2003 he followed several friends to Dublin. Today he logs 10 hours a day as a roofer and recently put money down on a new Dublin home. "In Poland I would have to work many, many years to have the same standard of living," he says. Wlodzimierz Oska, 44, a cleaner at the same construction...
Surprisingly, the new migrants have stabilized local labor markets. Not long ago, Irish builders were constricted by a lack of workers. Wages were spiraling to "ridiculous" levels, says John Dunne, the chief executive of Chambers Ireland, a business lobby group. A wage squeeze is one of the things unions feared most about the influx. Yet they too are benefitting from economic growth. Many of the migrants are signing up for unions because Poland has a long tradition of unionism. A British union, GMB, recently opened a branch in Southampton exclusively for migrant workers...
...wave of immigration that these islands have ever experienced," according to John Salt, professor of geography at University College London. With 10,000 arriving in Ireland each month since 2004, the country of 4 million people experienced the fastest period of population growth since the current system for measuring migrant flows was introduced in 1987. "What happened here in two years is what happened in other countries in a generation," says Sean Murray, head of economic migration for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in Dublin...