EU's migrant workers face choice: stay or go?

Economic migrants from the new EU member states are being hit hard by the crisis. Many are asking themselves: should I stay or should I go? But in the long term, things look good for migrant workers: Western Europe simply can't do without them.

"My future? Every night at 8 p.m. I know what my future is." Mihaly Angyal, 27, pale-faced and dressed in sneakers and a cheap wind jacket, is cynical. "Come, let me show you how it works," he says.

Angyal crosses the street to a corrugated metal shack. Inside, three A4-size print-outs have been stuck on the wall. They have tables with names and places on them. When to be ready, how many hours of work. If you're lucky. Angyal points to his name and the empty spaces behind it: no work today.

A friend has joined us. He wasn't supposed to be here; he was supposed to be working. Look, he says, pointing to his name. Eight hours of work, it says. And yet it's around noon and he is already back. "I go after one hour," he says in stilted German, "no more work."

It's been like this for weeks. Angyal and his friend are from Hungary. Together with a large group of Polish and Slovaks they live in a converted British army barracks in Laarbruch, Germany, a few kilometres from the Dutch border. Their girlfriends are here too. All of them work as temporary labour for mostly Dutch companies across the border.

The girlfriends were lucky today: they found work. But for how much longer? Of the six people who are staying in Angyal's house only two are working today. Temporary migrant workers are always the first group to be hit by an economic recession.

Angyal had heard the stories about the migrant workers going back home. His brother, who lives in London, tells him that tens of thousands of East Europeans are leaving Britain because work is getting scarcer there and the British pound has lost much of its value. It is the same story in Spain, Greece and Ireland.

This reverse migration movement was already underway but has been exacerbated by the crisis. In the UK, Sweden and Ireland, the number of Polish workers peaked in the last quarter of 2006. Since then, there has been a gradual decrease, which, despite a small revival in the third quarter of 2007, has carried over into 2008. In most countries in 'old Europe', the first 15 EU member states, half or more of the Eastern European work force is Polish.

Angyal hesitates. Should he stay or should he go? He knows that he can make twice the money here that he would make at home. And his father, a cafe owner, tells him that things are not good back home. "I really don't know what to do. I hear about people leaving but I also see new people arriving."

At least in England and Ireland the trend seems to be for migrant workers from Eastern Europe to go back home. The Polish embassy in Dublin says the number of Poles in Ireland has dropped from 316,000 to 250,000. The British home office reports that the number of work permit applications from Eastern Europeans has dropped by more than forty percent in the last quarter of 2008.

Demetrios Papademetriou of the Migration Policy Institute predicts a lot more movement like this in the EU in the weeks and months to come. Many workers from Eastern Europe never wanted to settle in the West in the first place; they only came to make money. And leaving is a lot easier if you know that you can always return when cheap labour is in demand again.

At the same time, countries like Italy are still going to need migrant workers in both agriculture and industry. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the UK, more than fifteen percent of migrant workers are employed as health or social workers - jobs that are hardly at risk.

In the long term, things look pretty good for migrant workers. Western Europe, with its ageing population and low birth rate, simply can't do without them, says Jemeni Pandya of the International Organisation for Migration.

"You can't ignore the demographic data," he says. "The crisis will be felt in construction and in the services sector. But there are many sectors, like the health sector, where there is still a lack of manpower. The structural need for migrant workers will remain."