Ed West Ed West

Warnings of a Romanian migrant surge were right

Remember when Keith Vaz got himself down to Luton Airport a few years back to greet new Romanian arrivals getting off the plane, declaring in his rather pompous way that:

‘We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January’.

This was in January 2014, when Romanians and Bulgarians were granted free movement to Britain for the first time, and on that day there was widespread guffawing among right-thinking people about how we were going to be ‘swamped’; Twitter, even more so than usual, was filled with humour that was ill-disguised class contempt and status competition. We were told by numerous publications, think-tanks and other bodies that the likes of MigrationWatch and Ukip were just scaremongering, and there would not be a huge influx of migrants from the A2 nations.

Eastern European invasion ‘comes to nothing’, the Independent declared. As a Guardian commentator informed us, the number of Romanians and Bulgarian will actually fall:

‘So MigrationWatch’s prediction of 50,000 a year over the next five years actually starts looking like a potential fall in numbers. It is not likely that fewer Romanians and Bulgarians will end up here but it is a possibility and one that is as worthy of consideration as all the “invasion” predictions that have more in common with astrology than demography.’

Or, as this 2013 Open Democracy piece pointed out, notions that people will move to richer countries to earn more money are too simplistic because ‘serious migration studies…are aware that the drivers of migration are much more complex and that migration systems, migration networks, migration politics, opportunity-constraints structures, social and human capital, perceptions and imaginations, individual characteristics and emotions play crucial roles.’

Migration Matters also poured cold water on claims there would be a big surge in arrivals.

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