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Poles star in Britain's immigrant success story

When Piotr Farbiszewski landed in London three years ago, he had enough money in his pocket to live for two weeks.

A successful technology consultant in Warsaw, he and his wife, Ela, a schoolteacher, had come to London to try it on for size; if they liked it, they would stay. To earn money, he worked as a builder while she flipped hamburgers. They decided they liked London, and within a year, Farbiszewski was a senior programmer at a software company.

In March, the couple bought a small terraced house outside London, where they plan to raise a family.

"We're very happy here," Piotr Farbiszewski, 31, said. "The quality of life is better, the economy is stronger, there is less bureaucracy, it's a multicultural society and the lady in the supermarket will smile at me. People don't smile at each other in Poland."

The Farbiszewskis are small players in one of Europe's most successful immigration stories. Since Poland joined the EU in 2004 and Britain, unlike France and most other members, welcomed Polish workers, an estimated 1.1 million Poles, mainly young, have come to Britain. Today, they are the third-largest group of immigrants in the country, behind Irish and Indians.

Britain has benefited. On Tuesday, the Home Office estimated that immigration added ?6 billion (US$12.3 billion) to the nation's economy last year. According to David Blanchflower of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, East European immigration has also reduced inflation pressure by increasing the supply of goods and services.

Indeed, Britain may soon face a novel immigration problem. As Poland's economy has improved this year, immigration has slowed, which economists say could cause labor shortages in British industries.

When Poland and nine other new members, most of them former communist countries, were admitted to the EU, many West Europeans feared an influx of cheap labor. In May 2005 in France, opponents of a new European constitution used the labor threat -- personified by an archetypal "Polish plumber," who would steal French jobs -- to help defeat the proposed constitution in a national referendum.

But Britain, along with Ireland and Sweden, welcomed workers from the new EU members -- partly because they took physically demanding, minimum-wage jobs that many native-born Britons snubbed, and partly because a wide range of industries in this country were suffering labor shortages.

Today, the reputation of Polish construction workers, nannies and caregivers is so high that other East Europeans sometimes say they are Polish to increase their chances of getting hired. At Strathaird Salmon, a fish farm in Scotland, more than a third of the employees are from Poland.

Immigration opponents were correct on one point: On average, Poles earn ?7.3 an hour, compared with ?11.1 an hour for Britons, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British institute.

In some regions, Britons worry that immigrants are pushing up housing costs and crime rates. The Polish influx was much larger than the government anticipated and unlike most previous waves of migrants, from South Asia and the Caribbean, for instance, the Poles did not restrict themselves to cities.

Some settled in remote towns of East Anglia and the Midlands, areas with little experience in immigration, where there have been some complaints of school overcrowding and a lack of personnel able to teach children whose native language is not English.

But a decline in Polish immigrants could be a bigger problem than a surplus.
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