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by ux-app
3973 days ago
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> "The first is that the disparities between regions within a country like the US are quite different from the disparities between countries across the world." That's a fair point, I'm sure there are differences which make looking at a country in isolation not very useful. What about the EU? There is free travel across the EU and the economic disparity between member states is huge. For example look at UK/Germany as compared to Estonia/Bulgaria. This hasn't resulted in catastrophic mass migration across the union. |
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Anti-immigration sentiment has been surging in the EU over the last few years in large part because of perceptions of excessive migration from eastern European countries like Estonia and Bulgaria ("the periphery", as they call them) to western and northern European countries like the UK and Germany ("the core countries", as they call themselves). In the UK, for instance, the UK Independence Party got something like 13% of the popular vote (though only 1 seat, because as bad as UKIP is, the first-past-the-post electoral system in modern Britain is worse) in this year's general election, and they're a single-issue, anti-European-immigration party. Word is that similar things are happening in other rich European countries, as seen with the National Front in France, the Danish People's Party in Denmark, and the AfD in Germany.[1]
To zoom in a bit on the UK (where I live), there is evidence that migration from the EU is high and growing[2][3]. But I don't think that anyone outside of those who are right-of-mainstream on this issue think it's catastrophically high. I'd guess at three main reasons for that. Firstly, accession to the EU requires certain "convergence criteria", which include levels of economic prosperity and social stability which, while not strict enough to mean that all the joining countries are virtually the same on these things, are strict enough to mean that they aren't as far apart as, say, the US and Haiti -- or even the US and Mexico. Secondly, the EU has a good few common institutions, including ones that do things along the lines of redistributive taxation.[4] And thirdly, there are differences in language and culture which might be restrictions to many people, especially in a continent as linguistically (if not culturally) diverse as Europe. (I'm guessing that and size are parts of why everyone isn't flocking to Luxembourg.)
1. Germany's Angela Merkel under threat from Pegida rallies -- http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/06/threat-to-merkel-from-right-w...
2. British and other EU migration -- http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/britains-70-million...
3. Bulgarian and Romanian migration to the UK -- http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/migration-statistic...
4. EU contractors and beneficiaries of funding from the EU budget -- http://ec.europa.eu/contracts_grants/beneficiaries_en.htm