http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9631117/site/newsweek/

The Polish Plumber
Guess what? He's here—and there's nothing to fear. So why not welcome Turkey
into the European Union?

Czarek Sokolowski / AP


By William Underhill
Newsweek International
Oct. 17, 2005 issue - It took more than 40 years of stop-start diplomacy and
a final round of cliff-hanger talks. But for the Turks the first great
crisis is past. Leaders of the European Union finally patched together a
deal last week that will allow Ankara to begin talks on joining Europe. Not
that all fears are allayed. Skeptics proffered all kinds of reasons, from
the cultural to the geopolitical, for keeping out the Turks out. A Muslim
nation has no place in a Christian club, said some. Ankara must first settle
its differences with Cyprus, said others.
But the greatest concern was more visceral. Old Europe fears for the job
prospects of its children. Politicians warn of an inrush of cheap labor as a
few million footloose and job-hungry Turks head West. The idea that such a
migration, however distant, might in fact be a welcome economic stimulus
fails to convince. The free movement of people may be one of the founding
ideas of the EU—but it poses tricky questions. Won't the migrants undercut
local wages? Or leech onto the welfare system? Or resist all attempts at
integration? In short: does Old Europe really need new blood?

Happily, Europe needn't speculate for long. A real-life experiment in just
this is well underway. These same fears surfaced before the EU took in 10
new members a year ago last May, its boldest enlargement ever. The prospect
of unfettered immigration spooked many governments, and at the last moment
12 nations exercised their right to keep a battery of restrictions in place
for up to seven years. Just three—Britain, Ireland and Sweden—chose to open
their doors immediately. By the time the controls come up for review next
year, there should be plenty of data on hand from testbed Britain.
Certainly, the initial returns look promising.

Researchers might start at London's Victoria coach station, last stop on
Europe's new migrant superhighway. In peak season, 100 buses a week disgorge
job-hungry Poles into its cavernous arrivals hall and onto the city streets.
The big lure? Cash. "The papers say the money is good here and it's a lot
easier to find work," says Chris Siemek, a 20-year-old computer-science
student fresh from a daylong ride across Western Europe. With unemployment
back home running at 17.5 percent, prosperous Britain is the land of
opportunity.

He won't be alone. More than 130,000 job-seeking Poles have registered in
Britain since the barriers came down. Polish teams now help to maintain the
Channel Tunnel, Polish drivers are at the wheel of Britain's iconic
double-deck buses. Polish workers, some recruited directly from Poland,
staff the warehouses of leading supermarket chains. "I hear Polish
everywhere I go," marvels 34-year-old Marlena from Katowice, a
postindustrial black spot in southern Poland, who arrived last month. "In
the shops, in the streets, in the Underground."

And the Poles are only the most numerous of the new migrants. From Hungarian
nannies to Latvian bartenders, it's a polyglot demonstration of the free
market in action, with workers from Eastern and Central Europe finding their
way to where they're needed most. Britain suffers from a shortage of
doctors; the number of Polish doctors registering for work in the country
has climbed eighteenfold since 2004. Last year alone saw an eightfold
increase in Czech dentists. To grateful British employers—the country boasts
600,000 job vacancies—it looks like a win-win deal. The hosts get a ready
supply of willing labor; the guests get a proper wage packet.

But try telling mainland Europeans. At a time of lagging economic growth and
high unemployment, the stranger from the East looks especially menacing. In
France, a jobless rate close to 10 percent means a big non to unfettered
immigration. Worry over EU enlargement was one reason why French voters
threw out the EU constitution in this summer's referendum, and the
proverbial "Polish Plumber," an emblematic job snatcher, loomed large in the
debate. "Do the French know that there are only 150 —plumbers from Poland
working in their country?" asked Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski,
incredulous, in the German daily Bild. The fear—as with Turkey—is that a
trickle could fast become a deluge. "France is afraid," says George Mink, a
research director at the National Centre of Scientific Research in Paris,
"and that encourages stereotyping about invasion."

Poles have reacted with mixed dismay and perplexity. This summer, Polish
tourist authorities put out a poster designed to lure French visitors. It
featured a playfully hunky Polish plumber with the tools of his trade slung
suggestively from his waist. The slogan: I'M STAYING HERE. COME ONE, COME
ALL. But not all Poles are laughing. Like other new members, they're
lobbying hard to ease mobility restrictions, so far with little effect.
Recent comments from Vladimir Spidla, the EU's Czech Employment
commissioner, are edged with impatience. Last month he told an EU working
group: "The freedom to come and go as you please is the very basis of
democracy and the rule of law... This situation can only be temporary, as it
flies in the face of the two foundations of the European Union: the single
market and our shared values."

His arguments rest on pragmatism as well as principle. A free-flowing work
force could plug the employment gaps in the affluent West—gaps that are set
to expand as birthrates decline and the working-age population begins to
shrink. Europe needs people, which many say is one good reason to approve
extending its borders to Turkey, where the population is growing at the rate
of 1 million a year.

Clearly, there are lots of positions that can't be filled from the native
work force, despite long queues on the dole. Economists call them the three
Ds—jobs that are dirty, dangerous and difficult. Germany takes in 300,000
Poles a year under a system of seasonal permits to work in the fields. (Try
finding a German to pick asparagus.) As for the craftsmen renovating those
beautiful old buildings in Berlin and other east German cities after
unification, guess where most came from: Poland. Meanwhile, Europe is
struggling to keep pace with the fast-growing economies of East Asia. Says
Peter Gottfried, Hungary's state secretary for European Affairs: "At a time
when we are seeking to address the issue of Europe's competitiveness, this
is a distortion that has to be eliminated."

History is on the side of free movement. In the 1980s, politicians fretted
over the prospect of a northern Europe overrun forever by impoverished
Portuguese and Spanish, then the latest members of the EU family. It never
happened. Joining the EU has usually brought the kind of rapid economic
progress that robs migration of its appeal. Why leave family and friends
when there's well-paid work at home? Besides, the inertia instinct is
strong. "Experience teaches that only 2 or 3 percent of the population are
ever willing to move," says Danny Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public
Policy Research in London.

More recent experience seems to reinforce the case. The migrant is no
bogeyman. Obedient to market forces, he's not going where he's not wanted.
Sweden, for example, has seen the number crossing the Baltic in search of
work rise by just a few thousand, even after allowing unrestricted access.
Explanations include a tricky language and a punishing tax regime. But the
true cause is probably more straightforward: a Swedish unemployment rate
that's running at 8 percent.

By contrast, Dublin's construction sites swarm with young Poles, ready to
endure the city's sky-high prices for the chance of a job and the
opportunity to improve their mastery of English. Irish authorities have
issued social-security numbers to more than 125,000 workers from the new EU
over the past 18 months. "The security guy around the corner is Polish and
so are the two people at the sandwich bar next door," says Magdalena Zysk, a
26-year-old political-science graduate serving at a downtown coffee bar. "I
wouldn't be doing the same sort of work in Poland as I do here, but the
money is more than at home. Maybe in three or six months I'll go back."

That makes Magdalena characteristic of the new-wave migrants. Early evidence
suggests that most aren't planning to hang around long enough to burden
their host nations in their old age. British government figures show that
typically they're under 35 and single. Often they're overqualified for the
blue-collar jobs they take. Indeed, more than half of Ireland's new-wave
immigrants have college-level qualifications. And once they've amassed a
little cash and experience, they tend to head for home. According to British
government statistics, less than 1 percent—almost none, in other words—have
filed for social-welfare benefits.

Meanwhile, they're bringing an entrepreneurial zeal and a robust work ethic.
Ask Szymon Czaban, 28, from Poznan in western Poland. Three years ago he
arrived in London with a degree in tourism studies and experience managing a
rock band. Today he's employing 15 of his compatriots in a London building
company. "Some of them were unemployed or in really badly paid jobs at home.
Give them the chance," he says, "and they really work." Result: higher tax
revenues and a few more consumers to keep the British economy ticking over
at a healthy rate. The government reckons the migrants' net contribution to
the nation's books at about £500 million a year. Put another way, they've
turned the migrant conventional wisdom on its head: these folks tend to be
economic stimulators, not drones, and certainly not leeches on the public
weal.

So, what about the doomsayers' talk of a market-swamping migrant flood?
Their numbers in Britain are indeed large—but hardly big enough to depress
wage levels. An extra 150,000 workers is simply too small to influence pay
rates in a British work force of 30 million. Besides, there's evidence, too,
that numbers are falling in response to market forces. Says Jan Mokrzycki of
the Federation of Poles in Great Britain: "After accession, the media
painted the U.K. as an El Dorado. People were expecting a queue of employers
waiting for them at the bus station." Even in Britain, the unskilled laborer
with a weak grasp of the language can't hope for much. The era that saw
large influxes of unskilled, poorly educated workers recruited from the
likes of Turkey's impoverished province of Anatolia is long gone. Sure,
there's still a need for grunt labor. But the successful economies of the
21st-century most need go-getting technicians, moneymen, engineers and the
like—and experience shows that they're the ones most likely to travel.

For Western employers, there's more good news: demand has already proved too
strong for those official controls designed to shut out the Easterners. Many
have found ways to sidestep the regulations. Since the restrictions often
apply only to workers taking regular jobs, not to the self-employed or to
businesses, building sites in Austria swarm with Hungarians transformed into
one-man corporations.

Not that hardheaded economists see unfettered migration as panacea for
Europe's woes. There's no point, for example, in injecting cheap labor into
a market that's too rigid to take advantage. France won't find the extra
plumbers it needs as long as it maintains its own elaborate culture of
form-filling. "Even if I had the appropriate diploma, approving the
paperwork would take eight months," says Wojtek, a Polish handyman illegally
in France. Yet both the British and Irish governments say they expect
Eastern Europe to meet the need for cheap labor for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps when the upcoming economies of Eastern Europe need workers, they'll
in turn look to Turkey. Thinking ahead, it's easy to imagine today's fears
turning into tomorrow's opportunity.

With Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Wojciech Rogacin in Warsaw, Stefan Theil in
Berlin, Ginanne Brownell in London and Anna Sofia Martin in Dublin