I have EE family members who came here very happily well before 2004. They said the UK gov was utterly foolish in what it did, utterly foolish.
I cannot believe we are even at a stage where anyone is debating whether what TB did was a good thing when He Himself Admits it was a mistake?
"Tony Blair has admitted he did not realise how many migrants would come to the UK when he opened Britain's borders to millions of European workers.
The former Labour leader relaxed immigration controls in 2004 after 10 new nations including Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, were admitted to the EU.
He tried to play down the significance of opening Britain's borders, arguing that most EU migrants came to the UK after 2008. "
This article, apologies, its the Guardian, pretty much says it all. Everything.
www.theguardian.com/news/2015/mar/24/how-immigration-came-to-haunt-labour-inside-story
"it is easy to forget just how much immigration and asylum haunted Downing Street throughout New Labour’s time in office. Between 1997 and 2010, net annual immigration quadrupled, and the UK population was boosted by more than 2.2 million immigrants, more than twice the population of Birmingham. In Labour’s last term in government, 2005-2010, net migration reached on average 247,000 a year.
The dramatic changes have left British politics ruptured. Immigration remains the No 1 issue on the doorstep, according to pollsters – a stream that feeds into the well of mistrust in politics. It has spawned the emergence of Ukip and helped create four- or five-party politics in the UK for the first time.
Even the most ardent defenders of the New Labour government acknowledge that such a wave of immigration was not purely down to chance. But the key players of the time show in candid conversations that they were struggling to cope with a new world of rapid population movement across porous borders. At times they felt they were stumbling from one move to another, unsure of the present, let alone the future.
From the first year in office, the issue had hit the Labour government like a whirlwind. In 1997 net migration had been 48,000, but it rose extremely rapidly over the next 12 months, almost trebling to 140,000 in 1998. It was never to fall below 100,000 again.
EU enlargement and the big miscalculation
In 1999, an unlikely group of revolutionaries came together in the warren of nondescript offices and meeting rooms that make up the Cabinet Office. Appointed to the Performance and Innovation Unit, a small team of civil servants were given a vague and innocuous-sounding task: to assess some of the long-term strategic challenges for the UK. “It was your typical sort of civil service thing – four bright civil servants being asked to think big thoughts about the future of the UK,” remembers the unit’s then deputy director, Jonathan Portes, who as an undergraduate had studied maths at Balliol College, Oxford.
At the time Roche gave the speech, the fact that Britain could not control immigration from the EU was a relatively uncontentious issue. In the early years of the Blair government, income levels in most of the 15 member states were on a par with UK levels. Migration from the three poorer EU members at the time – Greece, Spain and Portugal, which joined in the “southern enlargement” of the 1980s – was relatively low, thanks in part to the generous EU funding of infrastructure projects in those countries.
In 2004, 10 more countries – eight of which had been part of the eastern bloc during the cold war – became members of the EU. (The former communist states were known, in the political jargon, as the A8.) In anticipation of the enlargement of the EU, Blair’s government took the precaution of asking academics to assess the likely levels of immigration from countries in central and eastern Europe that were noticeably less well off. Per capita GDP, as measured in purchasing power parity, of the eight new member states was less than half the EU average.
The report that was produced by the Home Office, published in 2003, did not predict a dramatic increase in immigration from Europe. The challenge for the team that wrote the report was a lack of data. The iron curtain meant that there was little recent history of free migration from eastern European countries. The authors therefore had to use Commonwealth countries, ranging from Australia to Swaziland, to make their forecasts. Based on their calculations, the report predicted that Britain would receive between 5,000 to 13,000 net immigrants per year averaged over a ten year period from the new member states.
The reality turned out to be quite different. The Office for National Statistic (ONS) estimates that between 2004 and 2012, the net inflow of migrants from the new members was 423,000. And this figure is expected to be eventually much higher when the 2011 census is fully analysed. Politicians mocked the authors when it became clear a few years later that the estimates had been wrong. (At one point in the paper, the authors had even characterised some of their calculations as “back-of-the-envelope”.) Blunkett, who was home secretary at the time the report was published, simply ignored it. “It was too low,” he recalls. “When they start talking about 13,000 you just start blanking out.”
“I think the problem is nobody really has read it,” says Dustmann, who is now a professor of economics at University College London. The projection of 13,000 net migrants per year over a decade, he explained, was based on the assumption that all 15 EU countries would open their labour markets to the newcomers, ensuring that the migrants would be reasonably evenly distributed across the EU. In the end, just Britain, Ireland and Sweden opened up. The other 12 member states, most notably Germany, exercised their right to impose “transitional controls”. “The German labour market was basically closed for Polish workers and that kind of changed everything,” Dustmann says.
Indeed, tucked away on page 57 of the report is a careful qualification that a third of the 100,000 migrants predicted to head for Germany might travel to the UK instead if Berlin imposed restrictions on workers. Taking Berlin’s decision to impose controls into account, Dustmann says, allows him to add 33,000 to his prediction of 13,000 migrants, giving him an actual prediction of 46,000 net migrants per year. This is not far from the ONS figure of 50,000 per year, he says, though he acknowledges that the actual figure may be much higher.
Virtually all politicians now agree that the failure to impose transitional controls was a mistake. However, there are still commentators who are willing to defend the government’s record.
“One of the problems was that people were supposed to register if they were employed but many came as self-employed,” Denham says. “The biggest impacts were in self-employed trades like construction, where you didn’t have to register.” In the memo, Denham stated that the daily rate for a builder in the city had fallen by 50% since 2004. He also noted that hospital accident and emergency services were under strain because migrants tended not to use GPs as a first port of call. It also turned out that the local further education college had to close its doors after 1,000 migrants attempted to sign up for an English-as-a-second-language course on one day. Whitehall, Denham argued, was wholly out of touch with the concerns of his constituents. The government needed a comprehensive assessment to work out how it should deal with the surge in immigration.
Sir Stephen Wall, who was Blair’s most senior EU adviser between 2000-2004, frankly admits an error. “We simply didn’t take account properly of the pull factor of England for people with skills who could probably find a bigger market [in the UK] for their skills – you know, the Polish plumbe.”