CNN NEWS REPORT "Britain's Migrant Boom"

Transcript:

Oakley: When the flags were raised back in May to salute the arrival of ten new countries in the European Union, there was one sour note. Worried at the prospect of increased immigration, many of the older EU states put restrictions on the free movement of incomers to work on their countries. But now those who didn’t, like Britain, are gaining dividends.

Mokrzyski: Several British firms have actually set up shop in Poland for a few days, doing a sort of work trade, if you like, where people have applied for jobs and the firms found them accommodation here, and they are working happily.

Oakley: Handy for Poland, where unemployment runs around 20%; but good, too, for Britain, where employers back the Bank of England’s verdict that the influx of job seekers is helping to keep down interest rates.

Cridland: They explain why we are continuing to see increases in employment, reductions in unemployment, without the disease we always used to have when the economy overheated: wage inflation, inflation generally, boom and bust. The economy’s far more flexible than it used to be, and one of the reasons is migrant workers.

Oakley: More than half those working in the UK’s health service, for example, are migrant workers born overseas.

Cridland: They’re filling the gaps that either we have key skill shortages in – and I think that’s particularly noticeable in construction- or they’re filling gaps where people, frankly, will not do the work because of antisocial hours, because of relatively poor pay.

Oakley: But some opposed to increased immigrations see snags.

Green: It is true that a large flow of cheap labour will keep wages down. That’s fine for the employer. But of course, it’s the taxpayer who has to pay for the housing, the hospitals, the schools, and so on; not the employer. So, of course, cheap labour has some benefits. But it’s having a substantial effect on our economy, on the overcrowding in Britain.

Oakley: But not all the migrant workers like those from Poland stay.

Mokrzyski: Largely because they have already made some money, and they can go to Poland and either set up a little business of their own or anyway help the family who have been struggling while they’ve been living over here.

Oakley: Migrants help to oil the economic machinery. In Britain, construction, agriculture, the health service would be in trouble without them. But if business leaders can see the benefits of managed migration, many ordinary folk, fearful of seeing wage levels driven down, are yet to be convinced.

Robin Oakley, CNN, London