Social Turism; Fears and facts

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Fears and Facts
By: Klara Bové

Social tourism is an expression which came into the Swedish citizen’s vocabulary when ten new countries were allowed to enter the European Union. The new countries were Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It was a big debate in Sweden, and the government created a lot of fear of social tourism. Should we, like all the other countries in the E.U. except Great Britain and Ireland, introduce laws that restrict the possibility to get work permission, for all new countries except Malta and Cyprus? Those laws should make it harder for the new citizens of the E.U. to come and work in Sweden and through that make it more difficult to take advantage of the welfare system.

According to European Union law a citizen of an E.U country has the right to move to another E.U. country and work. If the person gets a job for one year he has the right to a residence permit for another five years. Even if the person becomes unemployed, he should have access to social support in the country of residence. He also has the right to bring his family to the new country, including his husband, wife, children or parents. The whole family should also have access to the welfare system.

In January of this year the Swedish government decided that eight of the new countries should, unlike in the rest of Europe, still have to get residence permits to be able to work, just as before. The aim was to prevent what the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson called social tourism. He was scared of the possibility that people would come to Sweden and use the Swedish welfare system. The fear was provoked by the fact that irresponsible companies sell fake jobs that give people from other countries a ticket to the Swedish welfare system. The government started an investigation to clear out the turbidity in the case, and the investigator, Bertil Rollén, compares it with persons who ‘have sold group travel into the Swedish asylum system’.

As late as December last year, the government remanded firmly convinced that there should be no special laws for some of the new countries. Only Great Britain, Ireland and Sweden protested such laws arguing that the new countries should have rights to be treated like the rest of the members. The laws are about making it harder for citizens in those countries to come and work in Sweden. The law says that it is enough for one person per family to have a job for ten hours a week and then have the rights that were mentioned before.

One can question whether or not it is a good law, but it is right to have different laws for different countries inside the Union. Does that mean that some of the citizens of the new countries are not to be trusted at the same way as others? Already in February this year, the E.U.-Comission presented a study that showed that less then one percent of all people in the new countries had thought about moving to another E.U. land within the next five years. If you translate that in to numbers it means about 220 000 persons per year together from all ten countries in a union that contains of 450 million people. “The research shows that the fear of an extensive migration is unjustified”, says the Swedish commissioner, Margot Wallström.

When the parliament discussed and voted on the question, maybe they should have listened to Mateusz Falkowski from the Polish Institute of Public Affairs, not only because he knows what he is talking about, but also because he represents the nation that is considered the biggest threat to Sweden. Poland alone has more people than the other nine new countries together. “That 220 000 say that they have considered moving does not mean that they are really moving. We know that Poles social flexibility is less than in the west, and definitely less than in the U.S. Approximately 90 percent of the poles are Catholics. Church and family have a central role. You don’t leave your family just like that. The ones who move are the ones with higher education. The little educated and poor do not have the economic resources that you need to move and break up a family. The ones that have the possibility to leave have already done that”, explains Falkowski. Bruno Dathomas, from the E.U.-Commission’s delegation in Warsaw, tells us that one and a half million Poles already work throughout the E.U. region. He thinks that Poles will move back eventually, with Poland is economy growing at six percent per year, compared to Germany and France which are growing much more slowly. Migration waves will, in the future, as today, only go one way. House services in Warsaw are mostly made by high educated women from Ukraine, says Falkowski. The reason is simple: they earn a lot more money in a Polish home than in an academic position in Ukraine. And the issue is, again the relationship, between Sweden and Poland one country loses their highly educated citizens to another.

In Sweden there is no one who reacts to the fact that nurses go to Norway and earn money, that pharmacist to Great Britain, and engineers to the U.S. The world is shrinking and if people, through moving, can improve their lives, why work against it? The Swedish growth debate often says that increases of the population in the cities gives positive effects on the whole society. We all know that movement on the market increases for E.U. as a Union. How can the question of a higher standard of living for the whole E.U. become a problem?

When the ten countries entered the union, there were special laws for them, which even Sweden, Great Britain and Ireland supported. The excuse was that if there should be only three countries that did not back it up, all the social tourists should go to those countr...