Popular perceptions – in reality misperceptions – of “sponging off welfare” by migrants from the EU’s newer member states have become an insidious, unspoken undercurrent of our political agenda.
In the UK they are spoken, and centre stage, brandished in the battle to prove the EU can do no right – the demand to prevent migrants from claiming welfare and tax benefits is a central, non-negotiable plank in the discussions over British membership. If conceded the EU will take a major step backwards in terms of free movement and citizens’ equality.
Today's study from the EU's Dublin-based research observatory on living and working conditions, Eurofound, is timely and should help take some of the ill-informed heat and rhetoric out of the debate. "The Social Dimension of Intra-EU Mobility" explores whether there is evidence in nine states supporting the view that the main motive driving the influx of new EU mobile citizens into key host states is "welfare tourism".
The answer is No. The evidence is that, on the contrary, as the OECD has also reported, migrants provide more to host states in taxes and social contributions than they receive in benefits, that they are broadly no more or less likely to be employed or unemployed than host nationals, and that they are significantly less demanding on the generosity of taxpayers in terms of welfare payments and state services than nationals.
The profile of most of these intra-EU migrants – young and educated, filling jobs for which they are overqualified, more vulnerable to poverty in a downturn – represents a major asset to much of "old" Europe where skewed age profiles are alarmingly raising dependency ratios.
That reality should inform not only a robust defence of Europe’s free movement and social model, but the beginnings of a debate on the call by NGOs for Ireland to open its doors to as many as 22,000 more Syrian refugees.
There may be substantial initial costs involved in their resettlement, but, as this report demonstrates, in the long term it would be an investment in our future as much as theirs – and, morally, it would be the right thing to do.