“WHEN British people come—in thousands—to our Black Sea, to our resorts, and behave like cave men, drink and fight, we don’t say anything… We are going to be much better behaved when we go to Britain. We are not going for fun, we are going for work, for a decent living,” says Petar Dobrev, who has been employed in several Black Sea resorts as a concierge in the past 12 years. Mr Dobrev is planning to move away from Bulgaria before next summer, to Britain or another European Union country. He says employers in his home country exploit people and pay them much less than they deserve.Mr Dobrev is hoping for fair pay in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and six other EU countries that fully opened their labor markets to workers from Bulgaria and Romania when transitional controls expired on January 1st. He is not sure where he will go, maybe London, because the city “has many good hotels and they always need people”. And he is determined to work hard to make a living for himself and for the family he wants to start.The 31-year-old Bulgarian is representative of the typical migrant from Romania and Bulgaria: he is young, eager to work and frustrated with the slow pace of reform and development in his home country. Yet he is unlikely to receive the warm welcome he hopes for. The public, politicians and the press in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and, to a lesser extent,…
The Economist: Europe