Legal News
Bulgarians not going to flood Britain from next year after says their foreign minister (4 February 2013)
Date: 04/02/2013
Nikolay Mladenov the Bulgarian foreign minister in the UK has said that Britain had exaggerated the risk of UK immigration suffering due to influx of Bulgarians from next year when the control on Bulgarians and Romanians would be lifted next year.
Mr Mladenov said that Bulgarians would rather settle in Germany, Spain or Italy than Britain. Speaking to Sky New’s Mr Mladenov also suggested that UK’s efforts to discourage Bulgarian immigrants could dampen relations between the two countries.
There have been fears over the potential influx of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria which joined the EU in 2007 and had agreed to temporary restrictions on movement of their citizens till 2014.
Some MPs and London Mayor Boris Johnson have suggested for an extension of these curbs and some have suggested Britain could launch a negative advertising campaign to put eastern European citizens off Britain.
According to The Observer, Romania has sought assurances from William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, that a promise to lift the controls will be honoured.
However, Mr Mladenov said most Bulgarians would not want to come to Britain anyway. UK was not the primary country of choice for many people to go and work as Bulgarian economy was mostly connected to the German economy.
He added that there were large number of companies working in places like Spain and Italy, where Bulgaria had a long standing traditions and where the labour market had opened to Bulgarians quite some time ago.
He rejected the suggestions that Bulgarians would follow the model of the Poles who had arrived in hundreds and thousands after their country had joined EU.
Mr Mladenov said that there were several reasons why Bulgarians would not come into Britain seeking employment and it was also a fact that in the past seven years this has not happened in other EU nations and there was no reason to believe that it would happen in the UK from next January.
There was no mass migration of Bulgarians across Europe seeking illegal rights or illegal immigration since Bulgaria’s accession to the EU.
He also said Britain should be grateful to immigrants for being "beneficial to its economy.
Ion Jinga, the Romanian ambassador to the UK, also said fears of a Romanian influx into UK was also unfounded and Romanian immigration pattern was not towards the UK but towards Spain, Italy and France as the language of Romanian being Latin was more close to these countries.