While a pitched debate is underway in the United States over illegal immigration, an equally fierce fight rages in Britain over the legal variety — immigrant workers from other European countries who, by treaty, enjoy free access to Britain’s labor market. What the two countries share is a tide of populist sentiment that wants to tighten control over workers crossing national borders and gaining access to jobs, schools and hospitals.
Facing an anti-immigration backlash, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday proposed slashing social welfare benefits for European migrant workers as a means of making the country a less hospitable destination. The move, which defies European Union laws ensuring equal treatment for workers across the open borders of the bloc’s 28 member countries, cannot be implemented without negotiations with his continental partners.
Nonetheless, Cameron, who faces a tough campaign to retain his job in next spring’s elections, said he would not “rule out” campaigning for Britain’s withdrawal from the union if his proposals are spurned in Brussels. That would be a mistake.
As Cameron knows, immigration into Britain is both a driver and symptom of the United Kingdom’s success. While many euro-zone economies remain sluggish, Britain’s economic growth has accelerated, and unemployment is dropping — even as net migration rose to 260,000 in the year ending in June, a 43 percent increase over the previous 12 months.
The prime minister strove to strike a balance by declining to meet demands of those in his own Conservative Party and the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party to limit or freeze immigration from Europe. Those migrants include waves of Eastern European laborers who take low-wage jobs that most British workers don’t want. Net migration into the country is now nearly at a post-recession high — and about 50 percent greater as a proportion of population than it is in the United States.
However, Cameron’s proposal would hurt thousands of migrant workers — and it’s not clear that it would drive down immigration significantly. He proposed barring European migrant workers from tax breaks, subsidized housing and child benefits (a tax-free payment aimed at helping parents with the cost of bringing up children) in their first four years in Britain and said none should enter the country without a firm job offer nor remain more than six months if they cannot find work. The prime minister says those steps would eliminate what he called a “massive cash incentive” attracting migrants to the U.K.
However, immigrants from Italy, Spain, the Baltics and, more recently, the newly E.U.-integrated countries of Bulgaria and Romania come to Britain mainly for work, not handouts. The welfare state benefits that Mr. Cameron wants to slash are sweeteners but not the main magnet for many or most migrants who can’t find jobs in their native countries.
In trying to accommodate nativist sentiment, Cameron is risking the economic dynamism his government can now claim to have fostered. As he acknowledged, Britain has benefited immeasurably from access to the E.U.’s unified market, a condition of which is honoring the free movement of workers. That includes workers into Britain.