Free movement of labour across the EU has become a controversial issue in several European countries, with parties such as UKIP and the Front National calling for restrictions on EU immigration. Adrian Favell writes on the debate over the issue within the UK. He argues that while free movement has generally been portrayed as an ‘immigration’ problem, it should instead be viewed as a set of rights which allow a range of short-term and long-term movements within the EU. He also notes that the UK economy has been particularly well placed to benefit from free movement, with cities like London being among the most attractive destinations for highly skilled workers.
The recent electoral successes of the United Kingdom Independence Party have seriously distorted intelligent discussion in Britain about the pros and cons of European free movement rights – not only for migrants but for Britain. As UKIP boasts it will “take back control of the UK’s borders”, and Conservative and Labour party leaders scramble to affect anti-“EU immigration” poses, there has been a serious short term memory loss about just how good migration has been for Britain these past three decades.
As London moved into a global city position to rival New York, the 1990s and 2000s saw a massive transformative dynamism in Britain as a hub of international mobility of all kinds, with new European migrations making London the unquestioned symbolic capital of Europe on the regional and world stage. Such was its success that everyone forgot just how dismal and provincial London was in the 1970s and 80s; before the era of what anthropologist Steven Vertovec calls its new “super-diversity”, based on Britain’s open labour market driven growth during these years.
Why free movement is not immigration
The first point is that free movement within Europe is not immigration. The vast majority of EU nationals using their rights of EU citizenship – to unconditionally move, stay, look for work, and choose to live in another member state for up to three months, longer if self-reliant – have been mostly invisible and rarely seen as “immigration”. These are the rights that, reciprocally across countries, allow people to send their children abroad to study, shop internationally with consumer protection, buy houses in sunnier climes, retire and collect pensions, get emergency medical treatment, marry and have normal family life and social benefits with a foreign European spouse, and countless other shorter and longer term cross-border mobilities.
They are also the rights that allow Europeans to look for work in another country, and be recruited and employed on strictly equal conditions to nationals – without the intrusion of border agencies or state imposed national limitations on the pool of workers. As a recent cross-national project (EUCROSS) has extensively documented, these rights have all become routine parts of everyday European life for decades now among stayers and movers alike, and are consistently rated the most popular aspect of membership of the European club – again, among Britons too.
Free movers do not change national citizenship and naturalise – they do not need to. Their citizenship and social rights are fully guaranteed by their nationality of origin. Because they have free movement across borders, they do not worry about visas, quotas, or arbitrary immigration checks questioning their right to be in a country – by themselves, or with a family. Typically, they come and go fluidly between their home (resident) and origin countries, using cheap air and rail travel, live in both places, with longer terms plans still strongly embedded in their place of origin. They live a kind of free transnational life of the kind that would have been thought a utopian absurdity in the bad old days in Europe; when it used to take hours to cross hostile, heavily policed borders, and when the continent was still divided by a huge population control device (called the Iron Curtain) which prevented Europeans, East and West, from mingling normally.
The benefits of free movement of labour for the UK
By design or chance, Britain during the long New Labour years found itself in a hugely positive position to benefit from these new European mobilities. With more flexible labour regulation, and employers generally less parochial than on the continent – as well as the huge appeal of being an offshore global English gateway – Britain was ideally placed to attract the brightest and the best of the continent into its booming commercial, financial, media, high tech, educational and creative sectors.
And come they certainly did, in droves – albeit almost invisibly – on Eurolines, Eurostar, and Ryan Air: the youth of France, Germany, Denmark, Italy and Spain self-selected in large numbers, transforming the London economy from the mid-1990s onwards. By the mid-2000s, these dynamics were being reproduced by young Poles, Czechs, Latvians, and Romanians, with similar hungry ambition – again, disproportionately, well-educated or skilled in comparison with the British labour force. Only now, the demand in the British labour market was such that it could also support much larger numbers of workers and entrepreneurs in lower skilled service sector employment. As well as sparking a service, construction and hospitality sector boom in Britain, these migrants also transferred wealth and investment back to their origin economies: such that Poland, for example, has been largely a positive story of internal growth and human capital circulation over these years.
Britain was a clear winner of this particular European trade-off. Suffering significant brain drain to its more dynamic neighbour, France remained mired in an economic sclerosis that prevented young people – nationals and foreigners alike – from getting respectable entry level employment. Moreover, it kept the doors shut to East Europeans through accession barriers that Britain removed at once after the first wave of enlargement in 2004.
Poles could follow a degree course in France only to find they had no access to a job in the country; the Polish plumbers famously were blamed for anti-EU voting, even though the vast majority had simply moved straightaway to Manchester or Birmingham. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, unions and labour market regulation also restricted entry, while abetting a new nationalist tone in immigration politics. In Spain and Italy, migrant workers faced much worse, more marginal labour conditions than in Britain, while their own educated youth drained out of the country northwards. Post 2008, the British economy has suffered less than its neighbours, while absorbing much higher migrant numbers.
How has this remarkable European success story been ignored? If any of UKIP’s contradictory ideas make it into real policy, there will be no more free movement to Britain for any of these foreign populations in Europe; and nor, reciprocally, for Britons on the continent. With self-selection ended, the quality of migration will fall – mostly defaulting to family reunification not human capital driven movements. Students and entrepreneurs will be shut out; and Britain will reap the kind of bad press that turned Denmark and the Netherlands from model progressives into nasty racists in a handful of years.
European free movement cannot be defined selectively to draw a line only against poor people, or people only from low income countries, or people from Eastern or Southern countries with bad credit ratings. Free movement allows the regional market, not the nation-state to decide. The state is defined by national borders. If new control is introduced it will have to be for all foreigners wanting to visit, stay, study or participate in Britain. British politicians presumably think that they will introduce some form of physical and electronic border control and visa system of the kind that makes entering the US such a complex and discriminatory process for “aliens”. Students may have to plan for months just to get access to British territory; no employer will be able to take their pick from the pool of European wide talent on offer; the most talented will no longer be able to see if they can make it in London, and will go (or stay) elsewhere.
At lower ends of the scale, British workers will be now privileged to take up the low paid, dirty, dangerous, dull, flexible and insecure work that a few years before they would have been delighted to leave to others. Many will still avoid taking such employment; there will therefore be fresh demand for cheaper, irregular immigrants from further afield. Britons may also struggle to relearn entrepreneurial skills that have been wiped out by East European competition. No-one, moreover, can gainsay the hard to quantify effects on other free movements – of capital, goods and services.
Will international corporations want to stay in a newly parochial British environment, wrapped in red tape employment restrictions and complex visa based immigration controls, which prevent the regional and global labour market from working as it should? Will trade with European neighbours recover from new intrusive controls on routine border crossings and business travel? Will the one million or so European foreigners resident in Britain be given three months to naturalise (a sure bet for the poorest and least wanted, if not others); or face deportation? Has anyone seriously thought about how the end of free movement of persons is practically to be implemented to avoid complete chaos for this 2 per cent of the working population?
The ironies of anti-European “immigration” politics in Britain today are manifold. Conservative nationalists are flirting with intrusive free market regulation and restriction – in the name of border control, insider community privilege, and labour law implementation – that might make a hardy social democrat blush. Labour nationalists, meanwhile, have turned blue imagining a return of Britain to a pristine, post-colonial, island condition, in which the new forms of regional diversity and cosmopolitanism that came with recent globalisation are shut out by frankly xenophobic barriers.
Neither prospect sits at all well with Britain’s long and justly proud multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-national composition, nor its long tradition of openness, toleration and the liberal freedoms of social and spatial mobility. Londoners, most of whom know something about movement and mobility, apparently largely agree: with UKIP doing half as well in the capital, and pro-European parties gaining well over 50 per cent in the recent European elections. The thought of cosmopolitan London having to align itself with Little England is surely impossible: maybe they too, like Scotland, should think about secession.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Feature image credit: Jon Rawlinson (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
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Adrian Favell – Sciences Po, Paris
Adrian Favell is Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. He is the author of Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe (Oxford: Blackwell 2008).
“The first point is that free movement within Europe is not immigration.”
What a ridiculous statement. Typical of the sugar coating that well-paid liberals offer in response to real concerns about immigration. EU migrants have definitely changed the makeup of my local community and I can see that some people feel that this is detrimental – it isn’t about net wage effects or any other bollocks that economists like to prat on about, but how individuals actually feel, what their community feels like and what their expectations are.
“it isn’t about net wage effects or any other bollocks that economists like to prat on about”
You’re right about that, the opposition to immigration isn’t driven by evidence, but emotional responses. Personally I’d rather make policies based on evidence, but that’s just me.
What matters more – that people think immigration is creating unemployment, or that immigration is actually creating growth/jobs?
As I said, London is the location with the highest concentration of “foreigners”, and UKIP and anti-EU parties did half as well as in the rest of the country. Its economy is also still doing better. This tells us something. Parts of the country are comfortable with being cosmopolitan, and understand how positively it has changed their lives. Xenophobia is not an automatic response. Most people in England are getting their information and attitudes not from everyday experience with others but from reading the Sun, Mail, Telegraph, etc… I don’t believe the population are more intolerant than in the rest of Europe. In fact xenophobic nationalism is a default in all European member states, and most others are much more restrictive in terms of the labour market and welfare state. Britain, surprisingly, has been the most open and dynamic country in this respect. But it is deeply schizophrenic and unresolved on the issue, and politicians and journalists are exploiting this.
The UK’s communities have been changed for many centuries by movements in populations.
In the second half of the 20th century this was from many former UK colonies.
Many Irish people emigrated to the UK and elsewhere in 19th century due to the potato famine.
Even Nigel Farage’s family emigrated to the UK from France, as part of one of the many earlier population movements.
Adrian Favell’s original point is well made. Benny Profane’s and Joe Thorpe’s’s responses indicate that these points will need to be made more frequently and forcefully to ensure that the moderate majority of the UK population are not seduced by such nationalist and protectionist view points as espoused by UKIP, certain powerful people and heavily flirted with by certain other political parties and newspapers.
You cant get away from the fact you can walk the streets of my city & there are vast numbers of people not speaking English & those that are begging would be the chief offenders that and the fact the fella playing the squeeze boze is tone deaf too
If UK leaves the EU then pensioners moving from UK to the EU would find that their pensions no longer rose in line with their UK counterparts. This would make it much less attractive for UK Pensioners to live in, for instance, Spain. How would UK cope with over one million pensioners returning en mass to UK. How much more strain would that place on the NHS. When you consider that one third of doctors, dentists and nurses working in the NHS are not British born and you see these people leave at the same time as the ex-pat pensioners return you can see the possible effects of such a catastrophic and shortsighted policy as closing our borders.
The people that are living in Spain are property owners not renters, their return to the UK would return a huge amount of capitol to the UK but we all know that the incumbents wont be returned from either side of the border so its daft debating it & with regard to the changes of pensions it will effect future relocations not past & present & like me most have private pensions which aren’t effected by government policy
Same old personal opinion dressed up as fact, in other words a load of tosh. The article makes no reference to the impact on public transport, housing, schools and so on. It also makes no reference to the impact on the NHS GP practices and the welfare benefits system.
There is also an underlying assumption that everyone who comes to this country is coming to work and is highly skilled.
Well, the impact on NHS of getting rid of immigrants would be catastrophic, given they have disproportionate number of immigrants working there, and immigrants pay more tax than they use services. So income down more than costs, staffing down more than load. Similar issues on public transport and benefits. Housing is the big one that’d have a positive benefit (assuming you see reduced house prices as a benefit, which not all house owners would, and assuming we don’t have as many emigrants return as immigrants leave).
Your missing the point, immigration, controlled like in Australia, Canada would have a points system, we would allow workers that we need not immigrants that are here for just any old job they can find which deprive our own unskilled from ever getting a basic start in life. Only a decade ago if you went into a restaurant you had students serving you, people that are trying to make a few bob towards supplementing their education. Now those positions are filled by immigrants which puts pressure on the state to support students even more than before.
And the point you’re missing is that point systems entail a cost. They create layer of bureaucracy which has to be paid for (both through taxation and efficiency losses). They also put an obstacle in front of businesses hiring the workers they want to hire which thereby reduces their competitiveness and damages job creation/growth.
That’s precisely why we created free movement of labour in the EU in the first place and it works exactly how it’s intended. The problem is that people have a stake in bashing immigration for the sake of it and are prepared to throw out whatever pseudo-economic rationale springs to mind (while ignoring all of the actual evidence on the subject which shows we gain from it substantially in the UK).
“Only a decade ago if you went into a restaurant you had students serving you, people that are trying to make a few bob towards supplementing their education. Now those positions are filled by immigrants which puts pressure on the state to support students even more than before.”
Firstly: why are you assuming that these ‘immigrant’ people in service jobs are not students? A large proportion of students at most universities are from overseas, many of whom are from the EU.
Secondly: in what ways are students supported by the state? It’s been seen to that students now must pay their own way through university, taking on colossal amounts of debt in the process, so what other state support mechanisms are they putting pressure on? In the majority of cases you can’t claim jobseekers or housing benefit if you’re a student; students are generally young and generally healthy so don’t put a great deal of pressure on the NHS; most can’t afford to make extensive use of public transport or have their own cars so – shock horror – clog up the Megabus and the city roads with bicycles.
There are a number of elements in this comment pice dressed up as fact.
Economic & Business benefits do not equate to benefits for the population, just the businessmen & the exchequer (if the businesses aren’t too busy using Luxembourg Juncker authorised illegal tax avoidance schemes to pay full & fair taxes).
The EU funded UCL report indicates migrants added £5bn to UK exchequer over a selective decade during which the UK paid net £42bn for the privilege (so net loss of £37bn). But, the report made suppositions about skilled labour levels based on a 1991 research paper & the effects of mass migration on native workers was based on a 2001 research paper… All supposition without hard fact nor hard figures, presented as fact…
When all is said & done, no matter how much the pro EU lobby tell UK citizens that free movement is good for the UK, the citizens perceptions (outside London) are completely the opposite. Tell the low skilled workforce their have benefitted & they’ll point to the fact they command 1/2 the pay they did a decade ago & laugh in your face!
BTW, Even UKIP aren’t talking about returning the migrants already here back to their countries of origin, they just want to exert control on future migration. Anybody saying differently is being dishonest & it’s time there was some honesty & facts in this debate instead of opinions & scare tactics!
“The EU funded UCL report indicates migrants added £5bn to UK exchequer over a selective decade during which the UK paid net £42bn for the privilege (so net loss of £37bn).”
Ignoring the usual “it’s all an EU funded conspiracy” nonsense that seems to get trotted out whenever this subject is debated, you’re comparing two completely unrelated things. We could offer free movement rights to EU citizens whether we’re in the EU or not, the point is that claiming EU immigration actively damages the country is at odds with the facts.
Perhaps you could also source your claim that EU immigration has directly contributed to a 50% decrease in low skilled workers’ wages. Here is a summary of seven studies which contradict that claim: https://fullfact.org/sites/fullfact.org/files/Screen%20shot%202012-12-18%20at%2016.17.50.png