European free movement: risks and rewards

Can a cosmopolitan immigration policy reckon with rapidly shifting demographics?

As many Pimlico Journal readers will know, the composition of immigration to Britain varied significantly across the fourteen years of the last Conservative government. Since 2017, migrant flows have been more Asian and African, and correspondingly less European, than in the first half of that period. Even now, the decline in net migration is partially attributable to increased rates of European (and British, for that matter) emigration, rather than being purely reflective of a fall in the number of Asians and Africans entering the country.

Much has already been written about the reasons and motivations for this catastrophic policy, which is now near-universally recognised to have been an act of egregious national and political self-harm. This is in spite of Boris Johnson’s attempts to revise the history of his own premiership, simultaneously claiming that the policy was a sensible choice to combat post-lockdown inflation while also claiming that it was an inescapable consequence of necessary grants of asylum for Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, and Afghans. Thankfully, there is no longer much interest in the thoughts of Boris Johnson, especially on the topic of Boris Johnson.

Britain now stands as a visibly less European country, and demographic transformation continues apace. It is in this context that some on the right, feeling the immigration restrictionist case for Brexit to have been nullified by the Boriswave, have begun to pine for the halcyon days of the early 2010s, in which Italian baristas and Romanian receptionists made up the bulk of the foreign population in Britain’s major urban centres. A recent article in J’accuse called for a second ‘Cameron-wave’, suggesting that (as well as creating a hostile environment for immigrants from the Third World), Britain should engineer a demographically favourable pattern of migration by increasing entries from Europe (and presumably also its diaspora nations). Whilst explicit Bregret is still uncommon (and perhaps rightly so), there is a growing sense that the unilateralist, anti-globalist populism of the previous decade needs to give way to a more consciously international outlook among nativists here and elsewhere.

As a proud Briton and European, I am an enthusiastic partisan of this approach. European migration should be liberalised, albeit with controls against welfare opportunists and criminals. We should also extend visa opportunities to members of European-descended populations in the Western and Southern Hemispheres. Whilst this alone will not fix our demographic issue — halving the non-European percentage of the population would require doubling the overall population through European migration, a goal too ambitious even for me — it would, combined with a maximally restrictionist approach to third-world immigration, do much to rectify the current state of British cityscapes.

For nationalistically-minded readers who baulk at this suggestion, I would stress that the mobilisation of foreign populations for domestic political purposes is not without precedent. Where we once settled Huguenots in Ulster and Flemings in Pembrokeshire to bring those unruly territories under control, we can now deploy our best South Africans and (selectively) Ukrainians to fill the newly privatised and redeveloped council estates of Stepney Green and Stockton. A new cosmopolitanism, for a new age.

There is, however, one major barrier that such a policy would face. Ease of movement between countries makes all partners vulnerable to the immigration policies of the weakest link among them, and non-European migrants naturalised in that country may well take the opportunity to migrate to countries with more bounteous opportunity. Indeed, it is some of the poorest countries in Western Europe (Portugal and Spain in particular) that have enacted some of the most liberal immigration policies, with naturalised residents often using these countries as ‘stepping stones’ on the way to Britain, Germany, or even Canada. If a more prosperous right-wing Britain were to implement CANZUK (a darling of the Boring Right), one could also reasonably expect an influx of Indians from Canada and Chinese from Australia to dwarf the flow of returning British stock.

Post-2020 Brexit revisionism has a tendency to overlook the already significant non-white immigration to this country, a sizeable proportion of which was facilitated by freedom of movement. The most obvious example of this is the mass movement of Romani from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. Of the 225,000 Roma living in this country, 85.7% (as of 2021) have a foreign country of birth, principally EU member states (especially Romania, Italy, and Slovakia) and Moldova (itself likely to accede to the EU soon) — and the 225,000 number is considered by demographers to be a relatively conservative estimate, given that many Romani gypsies will either not respond to the census or will (as is common in Eastern Europe) give a misleading response to questions about ethnicity. It was estimated by our editor-in-chief that 1% or more of all births in 2024 were to Romanian-born Romani mothers, on the basis of an inference from the massive per capita difference in births from Romanian-born (a group including both Romanian and Romani mothers) versus Polish-born (almost solely Polish) mothers, and that’s before considering Romani mothers from other EU countries.

It should also be noted that the British Romanichal community (distinct also from Irish Travellers) are overwhelmingly of north-western European ancestry, while conversely the more historically endogamous Roma of Eastern Europe are a phenotypically distinctive South Asian ethnic group with only minor European admixture. As anyone who keeps track of recent race relations will note, the Roma have managed to live up to every negative stereotype held of them by their Slavic, Romanian, and Hungarian compatriots. From Harehills to Ballymena, they have been both the instigators and the targets of riots due to their antagonistic behaviour towards native British people. Additionally, like their distant South Asian cousins from Pakistan, they have participated in rape gangs in many parts of the country, particularly in Scotland. None of these people were ‘Boriswavers’ brought into the country as part of Johnson’s liberalisation of immigration; they came on the passports of EU member states, alongside tradesmen and students.

We can point to other examples of European states which have enabled third-party immigration to Britain. Portugal and Spain, due to their liberal post-imperial citizenship laws, have become conduits for immigration into Britain from Latin America, West Africa, Goa, and East Timor. France has enabled at least some Françafrique migrants to settle in London. The Somali community in the Netherlands partially migrated to the UK. Indeed, Britain, as a country which gave the world its current lingua franca and hosts a major international city which is not really matched by any other in Europe in its international allure, is uniquely vulnerable to this type of ‘country hopping’, which — as we will see — is not just the preserve of boat migrants. This would remain true even with a far more restrictive welfare system. Even aside from the existence of London and this country’s use of the English language, our more liberal labour laws are also appealing; non-whites in Continental Europe generally perceive Britain as a less racist country; and Britain is also already host to at least a segment of most existing third-world diasporas, greatly smoothing the process of migration.

As the demographic situation in most European states (and especially in the diaspora countries of North America and Oceania) worsens over the next few decades, it is worth considering how we might factor this into future immigration policy — even whilst we hope a political solution emerges to prevent this elsewhere, as we do for Britain. The simple solution of ending all immigration, which tempts a small minority on the right, would forego the opportunity of consolidating Europe’s best and brightest within our borders. As European countries converge economically, reciprocal free(er) movement makes increasing sense, given the decreasing likelihood of significant unidirectional flows. More importantly, indiscriminately closing the borders would mean closing off the possibility of return to the descendants of these islands now living in countries which are further down the path of demographic replacement than us, and may or may not be able to halt the process before it is too late. We should not be so blasé about dooming our cousins to that fate.

That said, the period in which we could fairly safely assume that a Spanish passport holder is likely to be Spaniard is now long gone. Therefore, absent a formal system of pan-European tiered citizenship, a policy framework will need to be established in Britain which selects against these unwanted intrusions. Before I provide an overview of what this might entail, I want to outline the existing migrant diasporas who arrived through EU channels, and additionally the longer-term threat non-European migration poses to visa liberalisation within a wider Western context.

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The Roma

Both the exonyms we have applied to itinerant populations and the self-descriptions they offer to us have obscured the origins of many of Britain’s ‘traveller’ communities.

Broadly speaking (and often to the confusion of Continental Europeans), a distinction is drawn between Irish Travellers and Romanichal Gypsies (with the term ‘gypsy’ sometimes, but not always, regarded as a pejorative when applied to the former). These groups, while both having immigrated to Britain in the Early Modern Period and sharing a predisposition towards predatory criminality and random acts of anti-social violence, do not have a common origin. Irish Travellers, unsurprisingly, are of Irish provenance, where Romanichal Gypsies descend from a small population of Romani migrants who subsequently mixed with natives, making the modern population mostly European in ancestry. Interestingly, they retained Romani ways of life and even the Romani language until the nineteenth century, when it was largely replaced by Angloromani, an English pidgin featuring Romani vocabulary.

In accounting for their similarities, it’s worth stressing that most predominantly agricultural societies have a tendency towards internally exiling some elements within their populations, either due to socio-political exigencies or because certain individuals’ basic psychological profile is incompatible with a sedentary and often onerous working lifestyle. Most European countries, even though this has been lost in popular cultural narratives, had their own respective ‘gypsy’ groups, usually (but not always) the product of the intermingling of native criminal elements and Romani vagrants. The Taters of Sweden and Denmark (now largely assimilated) are one example, but there are also other native Germanic groups who, while being nearly entirely mono-ethnic in their origins, absorbed elements of Romani culture, such as the Fantefolk of Norway or the Yentish of Germany. However, the British Isles were relatively unique by the latter decades of the twentieth century in Western Europe in still being host to these archaic and quasi-nomadic ethno-social groupings in such large numbers. One might attribute this to the robustness with which Nordic social democracy dealt with unconventional minority groups, among other factors…

Into this confusing mix leapt the endogamous Roma of Eastern Europe, who have flooded the streets of Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, London, and Dublin, and of course the many English provincial towns where they can be seen begging, flogging the Big Issue, or otherwise pickpocketing unsuspecting East Asian tourists. In contrast to the actually-travelling Roma of Britain, who are fair-complexioned due to centuries of out-marriage, the Roma of the East look quite literally South Asian because they are of largely South Asian (and to some extent Middle Eastern) ancestry.

The following article from 2004, detailing Ken Livingstone’s ‘celebration’ of Roma culture, testifies to the elision of these ethnic categories in the wake of mass EU migration. Essentially white people celebrating exoticised folk customs held stage with foreign ‘asylum seekers’ (the fact that countries like Hungary and Czechia are regarded as ‘safe’ by British authorities is still a point of grievance among some Romani). The article also makes mention of the killing of an Irish Traveller called Johnny Delaney. In reality, the forcibly sedentarised and ghettoised Roma of post-communist countries have the same historical relationship to our longer-established Roma communities as the Beta Israel (‘Jews’ originating from Northern Ethiopia) have to the Ashkenazim.

Nevertheless, the official Roma population of Britain has exploded, and we are now host to one of the largest diasporas as of 2013. This Channel 4 ‘exposé’ from the time of the debate over Romania and Bulgaria’s accession to the EU is revealing. Documenting the Roma enclave in Page Hall, the presenter spends time interviewing the community of migrants as they loiter in previously English neighbourhoods and learn how to claim disability benefits in the local job centre. Sheffield (in which Page Hall is situated) is still host to a sizeable Roma community — estimated to be between 2,000 and 7,000 — and is a site of ethnic conflict between gypsies, native Britons, and sometimes Pakistanis also.

Telford, another town badly afflicted by the blight of multiculturalism, also has had to endure Romani gypsy migration and witnessed clashes between Roma and English youths in 2014. More recently, Harehill (in Leeds) was the centre of significant Roma riots in response to the state taking several children into care due to allegations of child abuse in the summer of 2024. As previously mentioned, in Ballymena in Northern Ireland, British protestants successfully expelled the larger part of a relatively small but aggressively anti-social minority in the town which had occupied a certain residential street (having spent some time in the poorer East Anglian towns around Cambridge, Romanis tend to rapidly assume control of a street or two, and therefore are capable of acting as a concentrated and menacing presence in spite of low absolute numbers).

The trigger for the riot — the rape of a 14-year-old girl by two Roma, the perpetrators of which fled the country — reflects wider patterns of sexual violence committed by men from this community (the prosecution seems to have inexplicably collapsed and never resulted in a conviction). Dundee recently saw the conviction of a five-member gang of Romani Romanian nationals for the sexual exploitation of ten women between the ages of 16 and 30, while in Canterbury in September 2025, three men were prosecuted for the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl. More historically, in February 2014, a mixed Roma-Kurdish gang were prosecuted for crimes against five adolescents in London. Roma have also been involved in intracommunal trafficking, such as in January 2015, in which five men were prosecuted for sexual offences against a fellow Roma. It should be noted that these crimes are different from the Pakistani rape gang phenomenon, insofar as the gangs are often more ethnically mixed, drawing from criminal elements within other diasporas, and targeting girls from their own ethnic background alongside British ones.

Britain, like Hungary or Slovakia, now has a self-perpetuating Roma problem. While EU remigration is a real phenomenon, and we unfortunately don’t have concrete ethnic exit data for these groups, we can safely assume that it is largely professional and working-class Eastern Europeans who are returning, and not members of the distinctive and ghettoised enclaves which now occupy various corners of British towns and cities. As a migration problem, it highlights how a policy like free movement amongst European nations, which is laudable in theory, has facilitated some of the worst forms of Third World migration. Most pickpocketing in the centre of my city is committed by Romani gypsies, and reviewing this event helps us contextualise recent historical Eurosceptic anti-immigration sentiment, even if it now seems passé amid the current deluge.

Lusophones and Hispanics

Whilst less problematic than the Roma, another two groups are also conspicuous newcomers whose presence in the country is almost entirely the product of intra-European migration, specifically, from Portugal: Goans and Timorese. All Goans born during the period of Portuguese rule (and, importantly, their descendants) are eligible for Portuguese citizenship, provided they are able to show birth certificates, marriage certificates, or passports indicating this. Depending on the documentation, this costs as little as €120-175 for descendants. Documents must be registered in Portugal itself, and Indian citizenship must be renounced. Taking just two to three years, this is obviously an attractive route — and there are currently 400,000 Goans who fit the criteria. Portugal is host to between 20,000 and 50,000 people of Goanese descent. Shockingly, Britain is home to 35,000 itself — with 20,000 concentrated in Swindon alone.

It should also be noted that similar naturalisations are extended to the two smaller and lesser-known Portuguese Indian territories of Daman and Diu. Predominantly Hindu and less culturally distinctive, migrants from these areas have also taken advantage of liberal immigration policies and have settled in the UK. Interestingly, EU-facilitated Indian migration has been cited as a trigger for the Leicester Hindu-Muslim riots, as Portuguese nationals broke the historic spatial divide between the Ugandan Asian Hindu areas to the north of the city and the predominantly Pakistani areas of the east.

There are estimated to be 20,000 Timorese in the UK, principally concentrated in Oxford, Peterborough, and Dungannon. Most of these in the first city are concentrated in Blackbirds Leys, and will presumably have access to social housing found in estates such as Littlemore. One particular Catholic comprehensive school in the area, called Greyfriars (which, under various other names, has been the most persistently failing school in the country), is host to a large number of Timorese who can only speak their native language of Tentum (non-proficiency in the English language is widespread throughout the community). While not notoriously problematic (indeed, many of them seem to have found work in Oxford’s colleges alongside a distinctive community of Central Americans), this is a highly welfare-dependent group (in terms of access to public housing and in-work benefits) which, despite possessing EU passports, indicates the same basic life outcomes, cultural attitudes, and social incompatibility of any other Austronesian ethnic group.

Of course, the biggest country with which Portugal maintains post-imperial connections is Brazil. There were approximately 220,000 people born in Brazil living in Britain in 2021, according to the Brazilian embassy, with 29% of those holding EU passports, with most having first lived in Southern Europe (primarily Portugal and Italy) before moving to Britain after the financial crisis. Numbers had doubled between 2011 and 2021, and have undoubtedly risen further since (even without free movement with Europe).

Finally, there are Portugal’s former African holdings, including Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. The latter was the birthplace of Valdo Calocane, who moved to Portugal and obtained citizenship before relocating to Britain, and after Brexit received EU settled status. In 2023, he murdered two students and another man in Nottingham during a psychotic episode, one of many such cases among African migrants. Ironically, Calocane’s first home in Britain was Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, where the English government once settled Flemings considered too violent and unruly to remain in the southeast of England, where they had originally landed. I wonder how much the lives of its modern inhabitants might be improved were Belgians once again their greatest concern.

In some respects, Spanish post-imperial citizenship laws are more radical than even those of Portugal. Spain allows citizens from Ibero-American countries to gain Spanish nationality after only two years of residency in the country, with the caveat that applicants must be able to demonstrate proficiency in Spanish (not exactly a high bar for immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries).

There are an estimated 250,0000-450,000 Latin Americans present in Britain, including first-generation immigrants and their descendants. The significant variance in estimations is the result of there being no ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ classification in the census. This also makes it difficult to assess what fraction of the British Hispanic population holds EU passports, but a 2011 survey estimated that 38% of London-based Latin Americans had lived in another EU country first. Other surveys suggest that 18% of British Hispanics have EU passports, and that 55% arrived between 2001 and 2011, with a significant increase after the financial crisis (a similar pattern as seen with Brazilians).

MENAPT and Sub-Saharan Africans

More concerning than the above cases has been the tendency for naturalised Muslim and African migrants to immigrate to the UK from Continental Europe. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found that as of 2013, 7% (a total of 141,000) of those who had come to the UK under EU rules were born outside the continent. EU migration to Britain continued to rise over the next several years, as did the share of the EU population born overseas.

Most well known is that 20,000 Somalis came to the UK from the Netherlands — about a third of the total community in that country. Most of these Somalis went either to London or to Leicester. Similar stories can be told of Moroccans, Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans, and other groups. Data on onward migration among these groups is generally hard to find, but it is unsurprising that people who have already left home for a foreign continent find it relatively easy to move again when other countries offer better rewards, especially in terms of welfare.

Some surveys have suggested that part of the motivation for this movement is that Britain is ‘less racist’ than other European countries, and various commentators (more often in the 2010s than now, except for last Cameroon standing, Fraser Nelson) have used this to construct a notion of anti-racist British exceptionalism which justifies the claim that Britain is unusually well-positioned to integrate such communities.

However, digging into these perceptions among this group, we see an entirely contradictory picture. What is generally meant by this notion is that it is easier for immigrants to maintain a separate ethnic and religious identity against British norms, whilst still enjoying the fruits of living here. This is in no small part because of the pre-existing presence of (at least small groups of) virtually every ethnicity in Britain already — some of whom have even achieved a level of success which might enable them to support newcomers within their community. All of these motivations are essentially self-referential, in that they express no positive identification with Britain, and instead only the instrumentalist view that Britain could provide their diasporas with unique opportunities.

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As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the character of migration to Britain changed substantially after Brexit. More immigrants from the Third World arrived on our shores than before, dramatically shifting the demographic composition of the country. However, we should also be aware that migration from the EU was not always more desirable, and that it has gifted us some of our most problematic diasporas to date.

Britain was right to extend residency to EU migrants who had arrived prior to 2016, and I am glad that Reform has said that its abolition of ILR will not impact this category of foreign national. But an opportunity was lost for a more discerning policy of remigration. There was no reason why the Roma, and also onward migrant diasporas originally from Third World countries, should have been allowed to stay. I believe that, particularly concerning the former population, a working relationship can and should have been established with the governments of Central and Eastern Europe to ensure their repatriation. There are ≈350,000 EU nationals of African, Asian, or Roma origin in Britain; logistically and legally, this is an easy win for an immigration restrictionist government seeking to deport interlopers.

Going forward, we need to remain conscious of how immigration agreements might unintentionally bring third-party populations to our country. Of course, most long-term immigration to Britain and other European states was the unintentional by-product of often well-meaning legislation. Britain’s Windrushers came accidentally after a policy designed to enable greater migration between dominions begat an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Similarly, Germany’s Gastarbeiter policy was designed to fill short-term job vacancies in particular industries rather than to enable the permanent settlement of Turks. If we are to effect an internally liberal system of immigration between culturally compatible countries, there will need to be conscious controls against the immigration of dual or recently naturalised immigrants from these countries (e.g., first- or second-generation Indian immigrants from Canada). Likewise, if there is to be a pan-European Youth Mobility Scheme, it is possible that it might be extended to countries with a significant Roma population, like Moldova.

A cosmopolitan but informed immigration system is possible, and even desirable. If Britain is to be a world centre, rather than an inward-looking and stagnant shire, it will be necessary to enable culturally compatible foreigners to live and work here to some extent, even if we can debate precisely what that extent is. Indeed, it is surely desirable to secure reciprocal arrangements which allow British people to pursue opportunity abroad, whether in Europe, North America, or Oceania. Ultimately, as European countries converge towards a similar level of wealth, we should not expect large groups from particular countries to permanently settle as a result of this. Even if Brexit had not happened, the rapidly increasing wealth of Poland and Romania would have tempted many of their diaspora back — as it has done across Europe in the past decade, despite continued EU membership.

It is often — correctly — lamented that London, more than any other city, as the historic centre of English national life throughout our nation’s history, is no longer an English city. Indeed, restoring its place as a national capital is a worthy goal. Nevertheless, it would be hard to argue that life in our greatest city would be made worse by the presence of young Europeans from across the continent, or that London’s position as a global financial centre would be bolstered by preventing those same people coming here. However, if young Westerners are to be able to enjoy mobility between kindred states, as they should, this will require more rather than less discrimination — and any future approach must reflect this.

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This article was written by George Ruska, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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