Romanians and Bulgarians Invade the UK – By the Dozen

Ok, so finally the feared numbers are here, in the open, for everybody to see and be scared by. How many desperate Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians etc snatched British jobs in the first quarter?

Enough to make one go to the pub and down a quick pint, wondering what all the fuss is about.

The latest statistics on immigration from Eastern Europe have been published by the Home Office on May 20 but went largely unreported by the media. How can this be, when these people with their strange accents are, after all, to blame for the sorry state of the British job market?

Well, I am sure the fair, balanced and open-minded media kept silent on these numbers so as not to spark unnecessary panic in the country.

But I will reveal them here, without fear, since very few people are likely to stumble upon this blog anyway.

Applications from workers in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia and the Czech Republic dropped to 23,000 in the first three months of 2009, compared to 48,755 during the same period in 2008, the Home Office says on its website.

In what regards Bulgarians and Romanians, 4,615 applications for registration certificates have been decided from January to March 2009, of which 3,055 have been submitted by Romanian nationals, according to the Home Office.

Read more on these truly horrifying statistics on the Home Office website.

The German Tax Man Forgives Nothing

Ah, here's an area where Eastern Europeans can work without necessarily having to produce their permits.

If you're a student and have something precious to sell - something so dear that you can only give away, errr… sell away only once – you don't need to show your visa, permit, registration card or whatever they call it nowadays.

But in Germany the tax man makes sure he always gets his cut. Find out what this Romanian student sold and why she has to pay 50% of her earnings to the state from this article in the Daily Mail.

"She would have been better off keeping quiet about this strange transaction," one tax expert told the Mail.

Yes, but how can a girl make sure she gets her 5 minutes of fame and is the envy of her class if she keeps quiet about such an important deal?

Are They Finally Leaving the UK?

At last a balanced article about foreign workers. The Financial Times writes that overseas workers are more likely to keep their jobs during the recession than the UK-born ones, partly due to the foreigners' willingness to work harder.

"Roughly the same proportion of British nationals and foreigners are unemployed - one in 12 - but joblessness among Britons rose by 600,000, or 43 per cent, in the past year compared with a rise of 16,000, or 15 per cent, among foreign workers," research done by the FT shows.

One of the reasons, according to the article, may be that the non-British workers who couldn't find work anymore just upped and left.

Yet another may be that different categories of people – such as contractors or the self-employed – from Eastern Europe are not entitled to unemployment, thus being left out of statistics altogether.

And last but not least, it may be that Eastern Europeans in particular are famous for their total disregard for lunch and tea breaks and their modest claims in what concerns working conditions and shifts.

Not that that's a good thing.

A Serious Case of Eastern Overdose

An article in the FOCUS News Agency says, quoting respectable economists, that for Eastern Europe the crisis is just beginning. The economies of the Eastern states, renowned as a source of cheap labour and lucrative speculation, are shrinking at light-speed and the party is over.

But the boom in property prices in some of these places (notably Bulgaria's Black Sea coast or Romania's capital Bucharest) was to some extent due to foreigners who bought properties on the cheap, probably mistaking the word "convergence" for "prosperity".

There are still some investors who hope that Eastern Europeans earning less than 12,000 euros per year will still find ways to pay for a 40-year mortgage with a 30% annual interest rate on a 56-square metre one-bedroom flat on the fringes of a big city with the modest price tag of 150,000 euros.

"In Western Europe there is addiction to the East because it is there where big profits are," Debora Revoltella, UniCredit Group CEE Chief Economist, said, quoted by FOCUS.

You don't say. I so have the feeling that the past tense would be more appropriate for this phrase. Forget about luring them into paying 30% interest rates on money borrowed by Western banks abroad for a mere 5%. They can no longer afford it; or, even if they could, now they know better.

As for where the big profits went, judging by the state of the economies in the Eastern EU, that's not the place. Maybe they were put into the banks' off-balance sheet special deposit vehicles. After all, it's not very trendy to show off your wealth in the middle of a crisis.

Democracy? What Democracy?

Apparently, one Danish MEP believes Bulgarians and Romanians aren't as intelligent, being in the south-east of the continent, as their Nordic colleagues in the European Union. Therefore, they should automatically have less votes in the European Parliament – presumably, calculated taking into account the size of their brains, their ability to solve complex mathematical problems or their capacity to learn very difficult languages.

"When I look at the voting rules, I see that countries like Romania and Bulgaria have many more votes than Denmark and Sweden and Finland, and I think - honestly speaking - that we are more clever than they are," Mogens Camre, deputy leader of the Europe of the Nations group in the European Parliament, whose People's Party is part of Denmark's ruling coalition, told RFI.

"We (in western and northern Europe) have much more transparency, democracy, and social welfare. And we don't think that people who did not create healthy societies should decide for us. Countries which we consider old-fashioned, anti-reform, in many cases directly reactionary, have so much influence in Europe."

Honestly speaking, Mr. Camre, when I look at what you just said, I see that given the right circumstances you could become much more of a dictator than Stalin was. Luckily for the Nordic state you represent, the democracy still at work within the EU prevents you from reaching your full potential.

Regarding the creation of healthy societies in these countries – you seem to conveniently forget who allowed communism there in the first place. Here's a hint: read Churchill's Memoirs.

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Headlines

An example of the finest journalism here, on the Daily Express website. The headline states: "Heading For The UK: 2m Desperate Romanians". However, the second and third paragraph say: "One in six 18 to 34-year-olds in one of the EU’s poorest countries say they see no future there and want to quit. Twenty-one per cent name the UK as their preferred destination, meaning up to 500,000 young Romanians want to move here."

Now, I understand that a headline is meant to make the reader want to read the full story but I would have thought that, given this recession, 500,000 was a scary enough number … and if one really wants to use the word "million" for sensationalim's sake, that number can be turned into "half a million desperate Romanians" and keep the headline accurate.