Are you ready to welcome the apparent flood of bulgarians and romanians....

Who would n't actually.

Apparently the Romanians don't want to come here anyway because of the cr sh awful weather. And we are not a Latin country. They prefer Italy and Spain.

No prejudice round where I live! We've got some lovely young asian fellers in the Co-op!

Micelf you been on the London Tube lately?

PS, good post.

Urban areas are not in danger of becoming 'hell on earth'. Urban areas are vibrant, diverse and generally speaking significantly more welcoming and less prejudiced than those localities described above.

Many East Europeans (Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Slavakia, Czech) who were intent of migrating for economic reasons have in many cases already done so. Poles, Slovakians, Slovenians and Czech's generally migrated West and North West, Romanians, Hungarians and Bulgarians have generally migrated South to the Eastern Mediterranean areas where language, religion and culture have many similarities. Likewise British and American economic migrants have migrated to where well paid work was to be found such as Middle East, Far East, South America and Africa. Generally within the petrochemical and civil engineering industries.
I know dozens upon dozens of Rumanian and Bulgarian workers within the hospitality (Hotel & Apartment) business in the Eastern Med sunshine, each and every one is exceptionally hard working and I should add in my humble opinion being exploited by their employer - but that is only from my perspective. They seem to be happy with the situation, as they see it as a means to an end. I know one young lady working around 16 hours per day at everyones beck & call and who still finds time to study in what precious little spare time she has left. Yes they are paid far less than local labour, yes they are resented for having the job by locals but lets not blame them it is the system that permits it.
I would suggest that the real fear is not an influx of well educated, qualified and hard working individuals of which there are many but the remnants including a large proportion of Roma who perhaps see the UK as a vehicle to secure wealth which they may never otherwise have access to, part of which is of course the benefits system. Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary are very poor Countries in comparison to ours but lets never forget that we do exactly the same when we work in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpar, Brunei, Saudi, Kuwait, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Venezuela, Colombia, Libya, Bahrain, Phillipines etc. Homophobia has no place in civilised society but that is not to say governments should be blind to the realities and fears experienced by their citizens and in turn take whatever legal means there are to protect them. We have joined an EU club, we have reaped the benefit of membership, such as it is, we must now have to live by its rules of membership or lobby to change them.

No Nonu I don't think you should be so bold.

The West Country is not overcrowded. Neither are the Yorkshire dales or the North York moors.It's the urban areas that are in danger of becoming hell on earth.

Lack of jobs in rural areas is a separate matter.

second comment from the bottom here

Overcrowding of the UK! Maybe you don't care about every bit of local countryside being taken up to shove more houses in, but I do! Many people need the odd wild space they can reach easily in their everyday lives but it's all being swallowed up. We don't all drive cars, or have open countryside right on our doorsteps.

A favourite open space of mine is now being surveyed for housing. And look at all the flood plains they have built on.

Economic migrants do not want to live in the wilds of Wales or the West Country.

Number as a matter of interest where can the doctors off load their patients to? Surely the patients on the doctors register still need to be with a GP somewhere.
They are having difficulty finding enough hospital doctors in Wales don't know about GP surgeries.

jingle 60% of "overcrowding" - overcrowding of what?
Maybe the real "overcrowding" is where Phoenix lives, where there are too many people for the available employment.
There are obviously two distinct regional experiences of european immigration. In eastern agricultural counties farmers and supermarkets are colluding in this exploitation of cheap labour - to give everyone in the country cheap carrots etc
I suspect farmers in other parts of the country are not particularly happy about this.
In other areas european immigrants tend to be well educated doing professional or customer service roles. These people tend to integrate well as they have excellent English and tend to be good employees.

Schools and the way we run them are not flexible organisations are they. For a long time LA planning was easy - you found out the birth rate locally, predicted the number that would be entering reception 4 (or 3 or 5) years later and planned accordingly. All the statistics on which schools are judged assume you have the same batch of kids from entry to exit.
With rapid economic changes leading to movement of labour around the country and around Europe schools cannot adapt quickly enough. It is also a problem recruiting teachers (and doctors) - enticing them to move to rural Lincolnshire to teach in an overcrowded school where a third of the class have limited English is not an easy task.

Someone said on the Today programme that sixty per cent of overcrowding in this island is due to immigration.

rowantree
the situations are not the same.

Jewish refugees were fleeing genuine persecution

down the centuries there has always been an influx of migrants but not in the sheer numbers there are now

back in previous centuries no-one cared about adequate health care, housing, social infrastructure - everyone shifted for themselves or starved. life was cheap for peasants - migrant and native.

Excatly the point I made earlier, Rowantree! You are right.

The same objections were made when there were Jewish refugees during the late 1930s.....and probably every time down the centuries when different people migrated to this sceptred isle.

DD works abroad but to do the job she wanted she had to have a good degree and when she wanted to rent a house she had to have references and be checked by the police. Do any of these conditions apply to people coming into UK ?

As stated above, yes, doctors services have also suffered, some, maybe all, practices in Boston have been told to offload some of their patients to make room for migrants, which, although the newcomers need medical services, is all wrong.

numberplease I agree with you. My sister is a teacher, Maths, in a Academy school not so very far from Boston. The money needed due to the increased number of children to provide extra teachers, teaching assistants, to build more classrooms, to build new schools is not forthcoming. I live in a city surrounded by farmland. The farmers are paying Eastern Europeans below the minimum wage, there are gangmasters, people are arriving here and living in squalor, they are crammed into what often used to be council houses and sending all the money they can home. I'm not suggesting they want to live in squalor but no doubt these situations are provided by either farmer, gangmaster, whoever. The housing market is suffering, schools are suffering, dentists, doctors, etc.
I grew up in this area and the rate which farmland is being sold to be put into someone's landbank is quite frightening.
I personally know, so no Daily Mail headline reading, a family, the Dad works with my OH, who have moved house, moved their children to another school because their children were being left to themselves in the classroom. There were no staff free to hear them read, mark their spelling tests as naturally the children who are new to the country are going to require more help. At some times in the school day the children would have to use the floor as their desk the classroom was so overcrowded.
I just wanted to add why did the unions at the time this was first happening not complain to the Labour government about people working here below the minimum wage? I don't rate any political party highly but I really don't understand why this alone was not given much headline space.
Surely it's just common sense, if you want or allow many people to move and work here make sure beforehand there are the homes, the, at the very least, minimum pay jobs available, the schools for their children, the doctors and so on all in place, the infrastructure ready. Because it's the least we would expect for anyone already here. We are surely going backwards when we are accepting beggars, slaves, people working for a pittance and crammed into houses like battery hens. If the EU with all it's millions of pounds think this is acceptable for the poorer people of Europe I for one am all for leaving the EU.
Sorry for the ramble and long post.

The only winners will be unscrupulous employers paying minimum wage or less...many British construction workers became unemployed as the poles were willing to work for less... as they didn't have huge rents or mortgages to pay, and what they were earning here seemed like lots of money... I have met care workers exploited who had their passports taken off them, and agricultural workers being 'charged' for their payslips... one of my husbands customers recently moved here from London bemoaned the fact that there weren't eastern Europeans here willing to valet her car for £5 and clean her house for less than £7 per hour !

There are lazy people in this country, and no doubt some scroungers 'over there', but frankly we should take as we find and not pre judge

Surely anyone with an enquiring mind who actually cares about what's going on in the world, regardless of where they themselves live, is right to want to know the sources of statistics and related information before making a judgement?

May be as bold as to say why should it worry you Absent.
You now are in far off climes !!

"Some sources…300,000". I'd be interested to know which sources – and, based on what data.

Still Good Old England will be the fall guy !!
Great shame !!

When many of the West Indian migrants came to Britain after the war they were actively recruited for specific jobs - mainly London buses and the tube. They and their descendants integrated reasonably well and many of the Asians came to Britain when they were thrown out of Kenya. People were glad to see the transport well staffed and the people from Kenya were received with great sympathy - quite a different reception to the situation we now find happening.
I cannot understand how the expansion of Europe is good for the central core of countries which are not collectively rich enough to support the new members. I feel it has been done far too rapidly to the detriment of the populations of the core members. In the beginning countries had to have certain criteria in place to be accepted - these criteria must have been downgraded to allow some of the new countries to join.Much of Europe needs to get their own economy in a healthy state and their population in jobs before accepting new migrants in.