Immigration is working
11 Grudzień 2007
n purely economic terms, the influx of
migrants from eastern Europe has been beneficial to the UK. Companies
generated record profits in the third quarter of last year, thanks in
part to arrivals from Poland and other EU accession countries.
The
latest wave of newcomers is, as we report on pages 4-5, largely made up
of young, single people who arrive without dependants, pay taxes and
are unlikely to be an immediate burden on the state. Migrant workers
have helped keep down wage demands; interest rates are, according to
one leading economist, a full percentage point lower than they would
have been without the inflation-busting powers of Polish plumbers.
The new arrivals may even help solve the pensions crisis by injecting
large numbers of young, economically active people into our ageing
population. Many of us have come to rely on the new migrants to fix our
leaky taps; Gordon Brown is banking on them to boost growth.
But
there are problems. One, as Bank of England governor Mervyn King has
complained, is that we do not have robust statistics on how many people
are coming in. The government puts it at 185,000 a year, but some
economists suggest it is as high as 400,000.
David Blanchflower,
a member of the Bank of England's interest-rate-setting committee, has
dismissed arguments that the newcomers are pushing up unemployment, but
the immigrants, often well educated and highly motivated, may be making
it harder for local youngsters to find work. We should welcome our new
workers, but employers and politicians should not use their arrival as
an excuse to ignore the plight of our own low-skilled school leavers.
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Gang responsible for smuggling millions of cigarettes
18 Marzec 2008
The investigation of an international criminal gang responsible for smuggling millions of cigarettes into the EU from former Soviet Union countries, Poland and China has come to a dramatic end with the arrest of 26 people in Poland and Germany, including the presumed main organisers of the smuggling gang
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