Yesterday, I talked about all those Poles and Romanians who have descended on our shores in recent years. Today, I look at Brits abroad and ask, are they any different, and how, when and where will it all end?
Let’s start by turning the telescope around. The aggregate number of British citizens living elsewhere in the EU is, give or take, one million. Less than half of these work full-time. At least a third are retirees, living off savings and pensions, mainly in Spain and France. Around 100,000 Brits are currently resident in Germany (including students and those in full-time jobs and their dependants), against 65,000 in Italy. Further east, there are an estimated 35,000 of us, including Poles with UK citizenship, making new lives for themselves in Poland, but – unsurprisingly perhaps – fewer than 5,000 in Romania. And while 95,000 Hungarians are understood to be living in the UK, mainly in and around London, just 10,000 Brits have headed in the opposite direction.
Further afield, there are said to be as many as 1.3 million residents of the U.S. who were born in the UK. Most, however, have been there for a decade or more; a quarter are retirees. It is much the same in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of which, along with America, make it hard these days for Brits to be accepted as immigrants. Applicants, with some exceptions, mostly relating to wealth or close family ties, are only admitted if they have a high level of skills or education or, if they are older, on condition that they bring the cash with them necessary to sustain them through old age. The days of citizens of the Mother Country simply being waved through the lines are long gone.
So much for sentiment. The long and the short of it is that there is a strong imbalance at work. Brits, by and large, do not emigrate unless (a) they have the cash to support themselves, (b) are highly qualified, or (c) are criminals on the run. There will always be beach bums, but the average age of British residents of France and Spain – or Florida – allowing for the minority who do work and any family they may have, is knocking on 60. Many are much older. I know. I am one of them.
They are lotus-eaters, or would like to be. Every year they transfer billions of pounds from the UK into the economies of their adopted countries and, while paying local taxes, are mainstays of the rural property market. There are villages in Spain and France that wouldn’t exist any longer if it were not for the “wealthy” Brits who retire there, filling their trolleys at the local supermarket, passing their time in bars and restaurants and paying builders (often Romanians) a small fortune to renovate and extend their homes. They are not universally popular – not least because most of them refuse to learn the language of their hosts – but they are welcome nonetheless.
Immigrant workers in the UK are a different breed. They come to work and, if possible, to make their fortunes. They frequently have skills that are in short supply among the native population and are ready to put in long hours for sometimes questionable wages. Without them, the NHS would be in greater trouble than it is and our productivity generally would suffer. The great majority of Easties are young, in their twenties and thirties (though they will age exactly like the rest of us), which means their offspring are entitled to free school places, a range of child benefits and state-subsidised housing. Newly arrived and lacking ease of communication, they tend (like Brits abroad) to congregate together, leading to shops, bars and high street services, as well as businesses, that, if we discount Polish plumbers and Romanian car-washes, flourish without obvious benefit to their hosts.
Crucially, East European immigrants living in Britain remit as much as £3 billion each year to their home countries, which (like the pensions and savings of British expats) disappears forever from the UK economy. According to the Financial Times, in 2016 the UK was the second-biggest source of remittances to the former East Bloc after Germany, accounting for between 3 and 6 per cent of the GDP of Latvia, Lithuania and Hungary. George Soros, it turns out, wasn’t the only Hungarian to cash in on sterling.
In addition, by exporting millions of their unemployed young people, these countries save billions each year in unclaimed state benefits. Those emigrés who return home are often able to set up new businesses and have gained invaluable experience during their years abroad. What, by contrast, is the long-term advantage to Britain?
I don’t claim to have the answers to the issues raised by mass immigration. As an Old-School Remainer, I believe that those who have come here legally, worked hard and learned the language have fully earned the right to “settled status”. If nothing else, the Windrush scandal has taught us the truth of that. I also accept that a country that turns its back on foreigners will find it impossible to compete for global trade. But I have less and less time for those on the Left who tell us, “Let ’em all in, controlling numbers is for Fascists.”
Britain is rightly proud of its ability to absorb newcomers. There is nowhere else, outside of New York, that even comes close. And we need to hold on to that. But tolerance has to be a two-way street. Who, outside of the Far-Right in politics, speaks up these days for the hard-pressed natives of the United Kingdom?
