As
Bucharest's giant stopwatch proudly counted down
the days until Romania's
January entry to the European Union, Constantin Ivan
stood on a crossroads beneath the grey apartment blocks that are a legacy of
the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. A shy,
17-year-old Roma in jeans and an anorak, he waited solemnly with dozens of
other men aged 16 to 60 to be picked up in vans for a day's black market work
building lakeside villas or shopping malls for Romania's new rich.
Ivan
knew nothing of the UK, had
no plans to travel there and was baffled to hear he had become public enemy
number one in the corridors of Westminster.
First it was the
Polish plumber that struck fear into Britain,
but when the home secretary, John Reid, this week announced plans to curb the
number of migrant workers arriving from Bulgaria
and Romania,
a fresh, faceless threat crystallised in the public
imagination: the Romanian builder.
Seven days a
week, Ivan gets up at 3:30am after three hours' sleep and walks 4km from his
village to catch a packed, slow train to Bucharest.
From 6:30am he waits at the crossroads for someone in a battered van or car to
give him a day's work, building, digging or shifting debris. He is paid #7 for
a 10-hour day. While Romania
enjoys an economic boom with plush office blocks and new roads dotted with
shiny cars, there are plenty of crooked building bosses willing to exploit the
gap between rich and poor.
"Life is
miserable," said Stefan Vasiliu, 53. His hands
were swollen and calloused after seven years working on the black market from
this crossroads. "England
is beautiful. People are very straightforward and honest." But like the
other, mainly Roma, men waiting in line, he didn't have the funds or desire to
seek a better life in the UK.
If these builders
did sell all they had to travel across Europe in January, they would choose the
favoured destinations of over 50% of the 2.5 milion people who have already left Romania: Italy
and Spain.
After all, Romania
describes itself as a Latin-Balkan hybrid with the emphasis on Latin, it speaks a language close to Italian and plays
Spanish pop on the radio. Its migrant workers quickly learn Romance languages
and many instinctively head for known support networks in Latin countries.
When terrorists
bombed the Spanish train system during rush hour in 2004, the second highest
death toll among foreigners were the Romanian immigrants on their way to work.
The British
government admitted that its decision to limit Romanian and Bulgarian arrivals
came after its vast underestimation of the number of eastern European migrants
from the last round of EU enlargement in 2004. Britain predicted 15,000 arrivals,
but up to 600,000 - half of them Polish - turned up.
Now the open-door policy for workers has been slammed shut. Unskilled Romanians
and Bulgarians will be limited to food processing and agriculture jobs. No more
than 20,000 will be allowed in a year. Skilled workers such as engineers won't
be allowed in at all unless they prove they are doing jobs that cannot be
filled by UK
residents.
Bad image
Mr Reid's announcement has
dominated Romania's newspaper front pages and TV debates all week, as the media
have raged about the injustice and humiliation of their being turned into
second-class citizens, treated differently from the eight other former
communist countries that entered the EU in 2004. "Sadly, Romania has a
bad image in the EU and that's difficult to overcome," read one newspaper
editorial. "Our most famous people are still Dracula and Ceausescu."
At the fountain
outside Bucharest's architecture facility, where bullet holes still mark the
1989 uprising that overthrew the Ceausescus,
English-speaking students had stopped talking about that other conversation
piece from CNN - Paul McCartney's
divorce troubles - to rage about Britain's negative stereotypes. "They
think we're all Gypsies and swan eaters," said Grozea
Alexandru, 23, in his fourth year of a degree in
construction.
Some students
blamed Gypsies for sparking a fear of Romanians in British tabloids. But Maria Ionescu, head of Romania's
national agency for the Roma, told the Guardian there was "no
attraction" in the UK
for Roma who were much more likely go to Italy or Spain. The Polish migrants knew
they had Polish cafes, restaurants and churches waiting for them in London when they arrived
in 2004, she said. But both Roma and Romanians didn't have much of a community
there and would naturally head elsewhere, even Greece,
or Germany,
which also announced restrictions on workers this week.
Hangover
While the new
EU-friendly Romania battles to curb the effects of a neglected, failing
education system, corruption, tax evasion and the malign hangover from its
powerful secret services, its unemployment is low - at 5% half that of France.
Many in Bucharest find it ironic Britain is
making such a fuss about Romanian migrant workers when the country of 22
million is suffering a work shortage. This week, the prefect of Botosani in the north-east appealed for more immigrant
workers to fill the job vacancies left by the departure of 20% of the working
age population. Migrant workers from Ukraine,
Moldova and Georgia are
arriving to fill the gap.
At University Square, Cristian Stroe, 49, a carpenter,
was sitting on a bench wearing his father's Ceausescu-era army jacket.
"You must remember that communism and Ceausescu was a catastrophe, a
nightmare," he said, describing a world where travel was banned and even
greeting a foreigner was a suspicious act that had to be reported to the secret
police. "Now borders are open, I want to travel because I remember when I
could not. England is one of the great powers of the world and a great civilised country, but we must not take too much notice of
these restrictions heaped on us - if we had, we would never have got this
far."
Sitting beside
Romanian and EU flags in his office in downtown Bucharest,
Nicolae Idu, head of the
European Institute of Romania,
said the UK
had already "frustrated" Romanians by still insisting on visas.
"I haven't been to Britain
since 2000. I don't like to be humiliated, queuing at the British embassy early
in the morning for a visa that all other European countries have lifted. I
prefer to meet my British counterparts in Brussels."