Geniuses at the Gate. Article on the European migration between east and west

Hans-Werner Sinn

June 30th, 2008 in “The Sun” New York magazine

Article, Web Article

English

The article talks about the recent waves of migration in Europe between its east and west. Within the first year of Romania's accession to the European Union on January 1, 2007, roughly a million Romanians migrated to Italy and Spain. More than 800.000 East Europeans have become workers in Britain over the past four years, most coming from Poland. In the last two years alone, 1.5 million Poles emigrated, and overall probably more than 2 million have done so since Poland's European Union accession in 2004. On a smaller scale, the migration of Ukrainians to the Czech Republic, Bulgarians to Turkey, and British citizens to Spain is also noteworthy. By 2005 Germany had absorbed 37% of all migrants from Eastern Europe that came before and after eastern European Union enlargement, whereas Italy had absorbed 22%, Greece 11%, Switzerland 8%, and Britain only 3%. In the same year, 13% of the population living in Germany was foreign born, more than in Britain (10%), France (7%), Spain (5%), or Italy (3%).

This immigration is not an invasion, as Italians refer to the Völkerwanderung, although the orders of magnitude are comparable. As migrants move between markets with well-defined property rights, immigration in principle is beneficial for both the immigrants and the target country. The immigrant receives a higher wage than at home, and the target country benefits from cheap labor, which creates more value than it costs. But in practice, immigration is often not as beneficial as it could be, because the target country has a rigid wage structure that prevents the additional jobs needed to employ the immigrants from being created. This is not a problem of immigration as such, but of poorly designed domestic social and labor market institutions. Still there are countries which have managed to attract skilled immigrants: the Anglo-Saxon countries (Canada, Ireland, Australia, America, and Britain, in that order), as well as Denmark and Norway.

www.nysun.com/opinion/geniuses-at-the-gate/80918/

Sebastian Neculoiu

`Carmen Sylva` Pedagogical High school, Timisoara, Romania

Pupil - researcher