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

I have nothing against free movement between countries. But I do think businesses are exploiting the people they employ. I have seen my own son have to take a cut in pay in order to compete. Big business is making huge profits at the expense of us all of us who work. The tax system is also being exploited by the agencies who employ the workers on a self employment basis. So that less tax is paid. My said son lives in a housing association 2 bedroom house with both himself his wife a15 year old and three under 5's because we have a housing sector has not kept up with demand. He had to abandon his ambition to get a mortgage because of a cut in pay and mortgages are harder to come by. He like many others is trapped in a cycle of just making ends meet. My worry is this may lead to future civil unrest.

Every one of the staff in my local Aldi sounds Eastern European. My son has applied for advertised jobs there on more than one occasion and not even had an interview. He is nearly 23 and has spent 3 yrs at college but has never been able to find a full time job of any description.

You can probably guess my feelings on the subject.

I think some of you gransnetters are living in cuckoo land looking at Romanians and Bulgarians with rose coloured glasses. When I was travelling home on Myferry.com from Calais in the summer there was a family of Romanians on the ferry who looked like they didn't have two pennies to rub together and when I came out of the shop the small girl cupped her hands together in front of me begging for money.

We went to Bulgaria for a holiday a few years ago. Beautiful hotels and beaches. The people in the hotels and cafes etc were lovely. When we ventured out further we felt a bit intimidated at times but I have felt intimidated at times here to be honest.

Over a million young people unemployed and god knows how many underemployed as a result of zero hour contracts and how will we ever get rid of these one sided work arrangements, when we clearly have such a surplus number of people.

I live in the South East a few miles from central London. We have a dire shortage of affordable housing. In my borough we have had many new primary schools built and existing ones have been expanded. The infant school my children went to, has gone from a small single storey unit to a new building with two floors, it has double the intake. Our borough still has a shortage of school places.

We can all give examples of fantastic levels of service we have had from Eastern Europeans. Our local cafe is staffed by Lithuanian girls and they are terrific. Similarly, many of us will have experienced sullen service from our own homegrown people. However, many Eastern Europeans have now been here a number of years and amazingly, not often, I have experienced the level of sulleness that I though only Brits could dish out. I have had fantastic service from home grown youngsters all over the country. As others have pointed out here it is easy to generalise. As I understand it Eastern Europeans have a very good education system. It's all too apparent from what prospective employers say that our school leavers have not been prepared for the workplace and let down by the state system in some cases.

Strangely, I think we have a duty to our own young people, by our own, I don't men indigenous, I mean the young people of all colours and creeds who have grown up in this country and inspite of that don't have the vocabulary, literacy and level of English to even conduct an interview that could possibly lead to a job, even if there were one out there. How are they supposed to compete with incomers, some who will possibly have a better standard of English as their second language than some of these kids who have had 12 years or so in our education system. How sustainable is it to have a whole generation languishing on life's heap without any prospects?

Of course we should allow a certain level of immigration, but I believe we should be able to cherry pick the best. What's the point of having a load of unskilled people arriving here to compete with our own kids who can't find work. How many of these people have a) somewhere to live and b) enough money to sustain themselves until they find work.

I read an article in the Independent recently about the established Eastern European community living in Beckton, South London, many who were working in the building industry for £5 per hour. They were worried that the Romanians would do there work for £4.00 per hour. Although there is much talk about how this government will penalise firms who don't pay the minimum wage, what's the betting this will continue, because there will always be those who are so desperate they will undercut the minimum wage one way or another.

Personally, I'm sick of hearing from Nick Clegg and the rest of the metropolitan elite about how wonderful it is that we can all float about Europe getting jobs easy peasy. Ask those about to be squeezed a bit more by the latest arrivals, those who can't get a job, a home or a school place for their child at the local school how they feel.

Romas are totally unwanted and heavily discriminated against in Romania and Bulgaria too btw. The word 'Romanian' is very misleading. I know this does not address the issue raised- but thought it is worthwhile mentioning this.

On another note- parts of the UK are really over crowded- but parts not at all. From our house in East Leics, we could drive all the way to the East Coast and never come across a single town (and only by-passing Peterborough). Again, not addressing the issue of this thread, but just saying. Holland is much more populated than the UK for instance.

Not any longer granjura.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/2967374/England-is-most-crowded-country-in-Europe.html

The above, of course, refers to England and not the UK. I still find it worrying.

Oddly enough, I was googling population density earlier following a discussion about it on Radio 2. If Wikipaedia is to be believed (and granted, it often isn't!), there were 419 people per square km in England in 2012, as opposed to 393 in the Netherlands.

Again according to Wikipaedia, Scotland had only 40 per square km, and Wales 146, which of course brings down the UK figure as a whole. The fact that there are vast swathes of uncrowded land unfortunately doesn't help those areas where services are being over-stretched.

As far as the Roma are concerned, I find it galling that we are being lectured by some Hungarian Eurocrat about what a nasty country we are likely to become if we impose restrictions, when they have a party in Hungary who have a third of the vote and espouse the sort of rhetoric that Hitler used to.

Generally the Roma are reviled in Eastern Europe and have been subject to awful persecution even though they have been there for centuries, it seems there has been no effort to assimilate them in any way.

As I see it, two of the biggest issues are (a) the lack of planning & preparation to ensure services can cope & (b) the lack of preparation of receiving communities & of incoming migrants. 5 years after the last wave of East European migration, my GDs birth in inner London coincided with the births of many children of the large number of Polish residents settling down & having children, leading first to maternity/health visitor services being overwhelmed & then schools being oversubscribed. It is also unfortunate how opinions easily become polarised & people labelled so that those with genuine worries, which could be quelled with good information, are too readily labelled as racist. For example, many parents with English as their first language & culture, worry about their children being in a minority at schools. I found it hard to research how schools dealt with this issue, & if any research had been done, without it being assumed I was racist. My concern is that we've seen parents are so anxious they move away before their kids start school, thus adding to the imbalance of cultures. This is such a shame as I found how well some schools deal with the issue & I wish they'd advertise the fact so parents have no need to worry.
GDs school does really well with this (GD is 1 of only 2 girls & 3 boys in her class with E as a FL) & she is having a predominantly positive experience but there are still issues e.g. she can feel excluded when non-E speakers go off at break & of course speak in their own language, as they do out of school, or when strict Muslims don't allow their kids to play in non-Muslim homes. Luckily she has an excellent teacher who listens to her Mum's concerns & together work out solutions. My DD has also made a big effort to get to know the non-British parents & finds some make similar efforts to integrate but others don't.
In Reception, every weekend, a pupil took home a bear & had to keep a diary of what they did with the bear. It was fascinating reading the stories of children from so many different cultures. What stood out was they all did & loved much the same kind of things.

There will be problems in towns which are already populated by large clusters of Eastern Europeans. The nastiness between some countries which had been suppressed by the Soviet Union quickly boiled over when they were no longer under the iron fist and it's not going to be any different here. Some established workers will worry that their jobs will be under threat and unscrupulous gangmasters will not care who they employ.

It's not just the British workers who are complaining.

Suspect there is a lot of confusion nationally between the terms Roma and Romanian, with many people imagining that all the Romanian arrivals will be sitting on street corners wearing headscarves, clutching their babies and begging.
Several things mentioned here are against the law - paying below the minimum wage for instance and discrimination by Aldi branch - someone should take them to an employment tribunal. I bet their recruitment practices involve indirect discrimination.
This kind of thing can happen when a particular manager taps into a vein of recruits that happen to be from one ethnic background. e.g. the UK hotel manager who told me his recruiting policy was to ask his existing staff if they knew anyone. Another job goes straight to Polish friend or relative. The cleaning staff in the gym I belonged to all came from the same part of Africa (this went on for years) - no co-incidence that the manager in charge of that aspect did too - he probably put up a little notice in his church. Businesses collude in this because it is a very, very cheap way of recruiting. (beats the hell out of paying an agency 15% of the first year's salary doesn't it?)

I should say that exactly the same thing happens in other businesses with preferential treatment being given to friends or relatives of employees who are white UK citizens - Dagenham car plant was a legend in this respect. And in N Ireland the protestants did the same thing in many workplaces.

This is a very difficult situation that we find ourselves in - most of us like the idea of free movement but it seems ludicrous that there can be almost no control from within the EU.

Just where are people going to live and how will it affect the problems that we already have with overcrowding and unemployment?

The last government badly underestimated the number of Poles that would come, hence the current one has studiously avoided putting forward any number at all to avoid criticism.

It's OK for politicians and bosses of big companies - they and their families won't be competing for services and accommodation.

For those of us pro-EU it's a very time.

People are people and there are charming and hard-working people in every race and community, and also plenty of the opposite, so I do not think it helps to generalise about this.

Th important thing is that any immigrants should feel welcomed not exploited, and above all else that they should integrate - that is my concern rather than the numbers. There are now more babies born to Polish mothers than any other nationality in our local hospital. On the whole they do integrate well.

Roma are a persecuted minority and the fact that many make their living by begging is because they cannot get jobs at home. I do however recognise what a difficulty this can be for those at ports and airports where they feel besieged by groups of Roma. I spent several years working with Gypsies and Roma and they have interesting (and diverse) cultures - and they do not always get on with each other!

I do not think we have a choice about welcoming new immigrants - if we decide to part of the club that is the EU we have to play by the rules.

You are right, Mishap - generalisation or anecdotes aren't helpful here. We are part of Europe, thank heavens, and must indeed play by the rules.

I suspect that immigrants throughout time, like the Huguenots, the West Indians, the Asians and so on, who arrived to live and work here, suffered the same mutterings about jobs and housing.

If workers are being exploited by being paid very low wages, I can see how that will upset the balance, and it is unfair for both those employed and those looking for work. This, then, is a job for the government, which no doubt they will shirk, as they tend to. (BTW I mean whatever the political persuasion!)

Here in Boston, we have more Eastern Europeans per capita than anywhere else in Britain. As for where all these extra migrants will live, almost every terraced house that comes up for sale in this area is bought by someone who lets them out to migrants, and there are usually about 10 to 12 people per 3 bedroom house. Where we live is currently nicknamed Little Lithuania. The local farmers say they prefer to employ migrant workers, but it`s only because they are willing to work for much less money. They also get given cards to do their shopping, so are not restricted as to what they can buy, and phone cards, with the result that it`s practically impossible to get into a phone box when a migrant is making a call, they ring home and are on for ages!

Maybe they have expanded the EU too much.

glad you said that Jingle, !!
Hmmmmmm

probably too flippin" late now !!
heyho -- what to do !

I for one do not welcome Bulgarians and Romanians to the UK, I am not racist saying this, I am mixed race myself and have Indian and Asian mixed race grandchildren but enough is enough we are only a small island, we do not have housing and jobs for the people already here. What is wrong in looking after ourselves first. I want to put my children and grandchildren first, I want my children and grandchildren to be first in the housing and jobs race. Would Bulgarian and Romanians welcome us if our position was reversed, I doubt it.

I've just read A Year in Brick Lane by Tarquin Hall. He resettled into the UK after life in India and brought over his highly educated Asian wife. It is an interesting read about integration.

I live in a village in a rural area, our bus services are pitiful (1 bus a week to the nearest town).

There are currently plans to turn a disused work area into housing.

We don't need more housing, we need jobs!

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.