Dr Scott Blinder discusses immigration from Bulgaria and Romania

Scott Blinder has been discussing the implications of the unrestricted right to live and work in the UK that Bulgarian and Romanian citizens will receive from December 2013. He wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian (15 January) and was interviewed on BBC Radio 4s Today programme (14 January) and quoted in The Independent (14 January) and New Statesman (16 January).

When asked by the BBC to give an estimate of how many immigrants the UK can expect from these two countries, Scott replied, We just dont know, adding that, Modelling migration flows is just not exact enough science to pin an accurate or useful number on it.

He did say that the lifting of these restrictions is likely to lead to an increase in the number of immigrants from these two counties, but he did add that several factors should make it unlike the very large rise in numbers of immigrants from Poland in 2004.

Apart from both countries combined having a smaller population that Poland, both countries citizens have also had free movement to the UK since 2007. It is only the labour market they have not had access to. This access will also be opening up to other EU countries such as Germany, France and Italy.

In The Independent Scott was quoted as saying: If you compare what is going to happen next year with what happened in 2004, most of what we know suggests it will be a smaller impact, smaller scale event.

You can read Scotts article for The Guardian in full here.

You can listen to Scott on the Today programme by clicking here (c. 1h 24m on the iPlayer).

You can read the full Indepedent article by clicking here, and theNew Statesman article by clicking here.