Ewa got on the bus to Brussels on Easter Monday. Two days earlier, her mother had returned home to this small town near the border with Belarus from months of scrubbing and cleaning in a suburb of the Belgian capital; now Ewa was on her way to replace her, cleaning the loos, minding the kids, and running the errands of the well-heeled European elite.
The 22-hour bus trip took her from the dirt-poor margins of the new Europe to its wealthy heart. Four months from now, the 32-year-old single mum will come home to her 12-year-old son with around £3 000 in the bank, around two years’ wages locally — if she could find a job there.
She will again swap places with her mother for another four-month stint and then once more take the overnight bus from the heart to the edge of Europe.
Like thousands of others in Siemiatycze, Ewa has been shuttling back and forth to Brussels for seven years. She wouldn’t have it any other way. ”My employers are great. They treat me really nicely. I wouldn’t dream of changing them,” she says. ”As long as you’re working, everybody leaves you in peace.”
This Saturday brings the long overdue unification of Europe, with 75-million east Europeans, including 38-million Poles, being admitted to the EU 15 years after the collapse of communism across the region.
Illegal
But even before Poland formally becomes a member, Siemiatycze is an integral part of the new Europe. The workers’ migration started in the late 80s. It is totally accepted, it is totally agreeable to both sides. And it’s almost totally illegal.
Ewa rents a room in the lavish villa of her employer, a Belgian architect. And every day for six days a week, she cleans a different house in the same street — the architect, the writer, the Eurocrat, and so on. ”Big houses, big swimming pools, nice middle-aged people, dogs. It’s great,” she enthuses.
In Siemiatycze, she is typical. Her mother, her two sisters and their husbands, her two brothers and their wives are all commuting 1 600km to Brussels once or twice a year to do the dirty work of the west European middle class.
Almost every family in this sleepy little town of 16 000 is doing the same. A dozen local transport companies have sprung up to run coaches and minibuses to Brussels several times a week. The local paper runs a full page of ads offering competitive rates to the Belgian and EU capital.
There is no official figure, but around 5 000 people from the town are reckoned to be working in or near Brussels at any given time. Given the huge wealth gap between east and west and the potency of the immigration issue in west European politics, the Siemiatycze commuters, who have seldom had any problems in Brussels, are unwittingly the focus of one of the hottest issues arising from Europe’s unification — cheap, illegal, migrant labour.
Governments in the west have been competing to introduce curbs on prospective immigrants from the new east European members. Rightwing populists and leftwing unions are fanning fears of their labour markets being flooded.
”There’s a lot of fear-mongering about this,” says Manolo Abella, chief of the international migration programme at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. ”I don’t see any major change in the next five to 10 years.”
Such views are underlined by myriad expert studies on east-west migration and the impact of EU expansion. The European commission predicts that labour mobility after enlargement will be ”moderate to limited”, tailing off to around 100 000 a year by decade’s end. ”Europeans don’t like to move too much,” Abella says.
Ever since the collapse of communism, there have been alarmist predictions of waves of migrants washing up in the west. In the 90s there were repeated warnings of up to 25-million arriving in the west from the post-Soviet bloc.
In reality, the actual figure over the past decade or so has been a 10th of that. Moreover, say the experts, those who want to move already have moved.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris takes a similar view on the non-prospects for mass migration, while other studies estimate an annual move west of up to 400 000.
In an EU of 450-million, this is not a high figure. Brussels also projects that due to demographic decline the new Europe’s working age population will fall by 20-million within a generation, necessitating an influx of immigrant labour.
Away from the lurid headlines about legions of benefit scroungers and armies of semi-criminal eastern Europeans ransacking the west’s generous welfare systems, the fact is that the phenomenon of the Polish underclass servicing the west European upper crust has been going on for a long time and is unlikely to change very much very soon.
”I organised the first buses in 1990,” says the mayor of Siemiatycze, Zbigniew Radomski. ”The Belgians were nice to us. I saw the demand.
”People go for three months. They come back at Easter or Christmas. Then they go back to Brussels. About 90% of it is illegal.”
Krystyna Iglicka, a leading Polish demographer and migration expert, says: ”It started in the 1980s and step-by-step the network developed. Siemiatycze became the pioneer. It’s very unusual, created from nothing.”
The reality of the new Europe is that the metropolitan elites of Hamburg or Hampstead now depend on cheap migrant labour from the east to have their cities built, their cars fixed and their plastering done.
Every May an army of 300 000 Polish peasants invades the asparagus and stawberry fields of Germany, legally, to get the crops in. Then they go home. Europe’s biggest building site for the past 15 years has been Berlin, the reinvented German capital. Without cheap east European labour, the new capital would never have been built.
In January, in an annual ritual, the parish priest of a south-eastern Polish village went round the houses to deliver the new year blessing. He found all the mothers had gone to Italy — just for a few months. The men were taking to drink. The children were neglected.
But while there are entire towns like Siemiatycze and villages in Poland which debunk to Italy, Germany, or Sweden for menial and seasonal work, the overall trend for migration from Poland is downward. Indeed, for the first time in its history Poland is expected within two years to become a country of net immigration rather than emigration.
Denmark is currently taking in hundreds of highly qualified Polish doctors to bolster its health service. A couple of years ago, Germany, in dire need of IT expertise, offered â,¬50 000 contracts to Polish computer specialists. It expected up to 20 000 applicants. It got 87.
”Generally the EU attitude is, ‘We don’t want Poles, but we’ll take the brilliant doctors and the computer experts as well as the fruit pickers and the illegal cleaners. We don’t want them, but we’ll take some of them,”’ says Iglicka. ”Slowly, but increasingly, Poles want to stay at home.”
Or to shuttle back and forth. ”I like it [there],” says Ewa in Siemiatycze. ”But I like it here, too. I don’t want to stay there.”
The impact of this new European reality on Siemiatycze is striking. New cars, new houses, new businesses and new restaurants are all being bought and built with euros earned in Brussels. In a depressed, rural region, where unemployment nudges 30%, the jobless rate in the town itself is only 8%.
Separation
That’s the good news. Edita, a 28-year-old mother of two whose parents and husband work in Brussels, is less than impressed. ”I’d rather be poor and here,” she says. ”The separation is very hard. My parents divorced in Brussels. Many families have broken up because of it. And the people who come back have changed. You can’t talk to them.”
Aleksander Rekawek, head of a local primary school, confirms the devastating impact, particularly on the children of the Brussels commuters. There are problems with drugs, discipline, and distraught children. ”You can always tell the children from those families that have gone away,” he says. ”There might be profits for the town and the labour market. But the family doesn’t profit.”
And nor do the east European countries themselves. According to experts, labour migration trends are acutely sensitive to economic opportunities, both in the target countries and at home, meaning that western cherry-picking of the best, the brightest and the young from the east has a brain drain effect on the poorer countries.
”Rather than a burden, it’s a boon for the west,” Abella says. ”Many of these people are young people of working age. They are professionals, they are not using the education services or the social services of the host countries. They don’t cost anything. They’re a net gain.”
In Siemiatycze, Radomski does not expect much to change on May Day when his people become EU citizens. But he thinks that slowly things should get better. ”It might become easier for whole families to be in Brussels, and there legally. It’s worse when one spouse goes. The worst is when both parents go and leave the kids with the granny. It’s better if the whole family goes to Brussels.” – Guardian Unlimited Â