Half of east Europe migrants go home

Half the central and eastern European nationals who came to work in Britain in the four years since EU enlargement have returned home, according to new research suggesting that fears of an ever-expanding migrant population are unfounded.

About 1m workers from eight accession countries – the so-called A8 – have arrived in Britain since 2004, a respected think-tank said on Wednesday, a far bigger inflow than the government initially expected.
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But the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that half this group had already left Britain, with the current population of A8, Bulgarian and Romanian nationals numbering about 665,000 – an increase of 550,000 since early 2004.

“The myth has been that everyone who’s ever arrived is still here ... but the perception is higher than the reality,” said Danny Sriskandarajah, one of the report’s authors.

Britain does not count people in and out of its borders, as some countries do. The IPPR study addresses the crucial question of how many migrants from the latest influx have returned home, the answer to which is vital to determining the long-term impact EU enlargement will have on Britain’s labour force and on policy for non-EU migrants.

The IPPR based its estimates on a survey of Poles, now the largest group of foreign nationals in Britain, who had returned to Poland after a stay of three months or more, using its findings alongside a range of administrative and survey data. It stressed the limitations of all these sources, but said it was clear that current patterns of mobility and migration were very different from those of past waves of migration to Britain, when most settled.

Mr Sriskandarajah said he expected the UK population of accession country nationals to stabilise “very soon”. He said numbers of new arrivals would fall consistently in the next few years as job prospects in Poland improved relative to Britain and as other EU countries loosened labour market restrictions.

But while the report confounds perceptions that all accession migrants will stay in Britain, it also suggests recent speculation that Poles are streaming out of the UK may be overstated. The survey the IPPR conducted in Poland suggests some migrants will continue to travel back and forth for short stays or seasonal work.

Mr Sriskandarajah predicted those who chose to stay in Britain permanently were “likely to be those who are the most successful”, including those who found it easier to run a business in this country.

He argued policy needed to adapt to more transitory patterns of migration, adding that if arrivals did slow dramatically some employers could find it hard to fill low-skilled vacancies now closed to non-EU migrants.

The IPPR also highlighted the extent to which the latest migrants had spread across Britain, with Poles registered in every local authority and large numbers working in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the east and south west, regions that had previously attracted very few migrants.