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Courtesy of the Telegraph.
Eastern Europeans call it the great 'Re-migration'. Economies are booming. Wages are soaring. Poles, Balts, and Magyars are returning home.So are Spaniards, drawn back to their own country after their Lost Decade. Let us not underestimate the gravity of the economic crime committed against the youth of Southern Europe by those who constructed monetary union and then ran it into the ground.
Yet Europe has turned the page on that sorry saga, and this has enormous ramifications for Britain. The EU migrant shock that hit the country in two great waves over the period from 2004 to 2016 is abating. We can now see that it was one-off effect, an historic aberration. Theresa May's cardinal sin is to misjudge these economic forces, fixing doggedly on the one issue of immigration in Brexit strategy as if nothing had changed.To the extent that there is a 'trade-off' between access to the EU economy and power to restrict EU labour flows, the calculus should at least reflect reality on the ground.
It is abject statecraft to risk grave damage to UK industry and the City – or to undermine Britain's "soft power" as an open liberal nation – in order to tackle an issue that is self-correcting anyway.
You might as well just leave the borders open in Britain because they're not coming anyway
Work by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research points to a much greater threat: that we will soon have trouble recruiting enough staff from the EU to keep the British show on the road.
You can see this from the monthly register of new nurses and midwives coming from the EU. New arrivals were 131 in April and May, compared 2,270 over the same two months last year. Twice as many are leaving as joining.If hard Brexiteers took a closer look at Poland, they might be astonished. The economy is firing on all cylinders at 4pc growth. "It's becoming absolutely impossible to find workers however much you pay them," said Bartosz Pawlowski, a former hedge fund manager in London and now at MBank in Warsaw.
"The labour market is red-hot. You might as well just leave the borders open in Britain because they're not coming anyway," he said.The World Bank says Poland has reached the highest level of relative incomes with Western Europe since 1500, the golden age of the Jagiellon kings when Copernicus was at the Krakow Academy.
It is also hitting a demographic crunch. The working age population is about to shrink by 250,000 a year. The country has had to issue 1.3m temporary work-visas to Ukrainians to fill posts.In Hungary, wages have risen 15pc over the last year. The minimum wage for skilled workers is to jump by 25pc this year and 12pc next year. If you combine that with a 20pc rise in the Hungarian forint against sterling in eighteen months, wage differentials are vanishing.