The gap between rich and poor in Barcelona

It’s interesting how nothing changes with time. The Roman Empire was built on the backs of slaves and Western civilisation is built on cheap labour- first our own people at the beginning of the industrial revolution and now on immigrant labour or overseas sweatshops.

The European Union has attracted 26 million migrants in the past two decades. Most European countries try to protect home-grown labour by shutting out foreign workers. The result? A massive influx of illegal aliens who tend to accept rock-bottom wages and benefits. Of migrants to developed countries, Europe has ended up with 85% of all the unskilled but only 5% of the highly skilled.

For some time everyone, migrants and locals alike, were satisfied because jobs that nobody wanted to do got done. Today, in the presence of never-ending credit crunch, immigration has a tendency to bring out the worst in people, evoking outsize, even irrational reactions. Billed as a great equaliser between the rich and the poor, globalisation has been anything but. Instead it has given rise to a new and rapidly expanding unskilled migrant underclass that share services, schools, hospitals and housing with the poorest locals and threatens to change the image of a successful Europe.

The Unskilled Underclass

In 2004, the European Union accepted eight Eastern European nations and in a very short space of time, 1.5 million people travelled to the United Kingdom. The majority of immigrants were young, spoke little or no English, and were ready to work 16 hours a day for as little as £1.50 an hour. They moved to cheap hostels and hotels, shared rooms with eight to fifteen people, slept in bunk beds, and used public bathrooms and rat-infested kitchens. Low salaries in their home countries, sometimes around £200 a month, caused migrants to have little or no expectations of their professional situation. They were willing to do anything from factory work to cleaning and catering. From fish processing in Scotland to orange picking in Italy and France: in other words, work that was even beneath the local working class.

Professor of Sociology Richard Sennett, who has written extensively on the personal effects of globalisation on workers, indicates that we can’t compare local and migrant workers. The average migrant worker is young and “putting aside cash to go home maybe to start a car washing business or open a small shop. It’s about concentrating into a short time as much labour as you can. They’re not going to do that all their lives”.

The scale of immigration has changed in the past few years. The East European workers who invaded Europe after 2004 have moved out of hostels, graduated from high schools, and are attending universities or learning a trade. The new underclass comes from the new EU countries: Bulgaria, Romania, the Balkan peninsula, Somalia, Turkey and the Middle East. According to Josep Oliver, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona, about 40% of immigrants migrating to Europe today have been educated to primary school level and are therefore less successful at avoiding unskilled work and in danger of “getting stuck” in poverty. The Germans and French are particularly worried about the underclass immigrants who are unwilling to learn the language and have isolated themselves from society at large. Many of these immigrants come to Europe with tourist visas, are unable to find legal work and are forced to live in secret.

To avoid an illegal and poor workforce, Europe is rethinking its immigration policy and, like Australia and U.S, is evolving towards greater selectiveness and favouring those who can fill the skill gaps. Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has warned that it takes decades to turn immigration policy around and mistakes made today will affect our lives decades to come.

The grim reality for some immigrants

Yet highly skilled workers are vital for ensuring innovation and improving productivity, and therefore for creating new jobs. A study on the impact of the Green Card programme for IT workers, for example, estimated that each high skilled migrant created on average 2.5 new jobs in Germany. Today, labour migration fills critical gaps in IT, engineering, construction, agriculture, tourism, and domestic services. Everything seems perfect but…

Growing Nationalism in Europe

Unlike the New World countries (America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), Europe has found it difficult to come to terms with the fact of immigration. Ever since politicians started shouting popular slogans along the lines of “British jobs to British workers”, immigration has overlapped with other emotional matters such as ethnicity and identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment has manifested itself: negative reporting on immigrants and asylum-seekers in the popular press, discrimination against ethnic minority groups, and anti-immigrant harassment and violence. In recent news, one of Finland’s biggest newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat , published a long article how Estonian builders ruin the tender balance of Northern Finland’s labour market and are stealing the jobs locals should do.

44-year-old Terry Garner is an unemployed plumber from Wisbech in the UK: “A lot of youngsters from here don’t want this sort of work but it’s all I’ve ever done,” he says. “There are a lot of these kids. All they want is unemployment benefits and they’re happy.” The press is quick to claim that local manual workers have priced themselves out of the labour market – with migrants willing to toil for less, and bosses happy to pay lower rates without sacrificing standards. Meanwhile employers claim they had to turn to migrant labour because they couldn’t get good indigenous employees.

The Underclass across Europe

The rest of Europe struggles as well – both in finding the necessary workforce, and in integrating these new workers into society. Just recently in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a noisy debate about “French identity” and is seriously considering a ban on burqas. Elsewhere, Belgium has imposed a ban on veils, and Switzerland has outlawed minarets. Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk argues that the Netherlands can no longer afford to welcome immigrants who will not integrate into mainstream society, which is why she has advocated a new restrictive visa system. At the moment Holland has over 600,000 people who don’t speak Dutch fluently and who are mostly unemployed.

In Italy, the biggest issues relate to what to do with the large number of illegal immigrants; how to tackle the large-scale trafficking of migrants (particularly by speed-boat from Albania), and concern at the involvement of the mafia in the smuggling gangs. Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior minister, a member of the xenophobic Northern League (Lega Nord), has sent armed carabinieri to clear out camps of jobless migrants in Naples and other parts of the south. Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the right-wing Forza Italia, and Umberto Bossi, leader of the Lega Nord, successfully fought April’s regional elections on a stringent anti-immigration, anti-asylum platform.

A demonstration for immigrant rights in Paris

Spain and the Czech Republic are using a different technique and are actually paying migrants to go away. Spain, with the EU highest unemployment rate (20 percent), has changed its visa rules, often denies renewal requests if migrants who become unemployed, and fail to make sufficient social security payments. Five million migrants arrived during Spain’s decade of heady economic growth from the mid-1990s, finding work on mushrooming construction sites, in shops or as domestic helpers. When the crisis hit, immigrants have been losing jobs at almost twice the rate of native-born citizens, and, like in many European countries, the socio-economic gap between immigrants and natives has begun to grow again. Angel Moratinos, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, has never hidden his preference for seasonal workers who can return home after the work is done.

Catherine Colonna, French State Minister for European Affairs, pointed out in one interview that France welcomes immigrants from Africa, but is particularly open to students, medics and scientists. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero assured the world that immigration is a way to both make Spain more tolerant and diverse, and to ensure an ageing population would be able to continue to afford their luxurious lifestyle.

However, businesses across Europe are already facing severe shortages of engineers, technicians, craftspeople, and other skilled professionals, with four million unfilled jobs across the continent. Europe is on track to lose 52 million workers between now and 2050 — unless it begins embracing immigrants fast.