Britain braces for fresh Eastern European immigration wave

Coils of Polish sausages glisten on shop counters and vodka bottles line the shelves. In this corner of the English countryside, much of the chatter is in Latvian or Lithuanian, AFP reports. Welcome to Boston, the most Eastern European town in Britain. Census data shows that more than a tenth of the residents of this sleepy outpost in rural Lincolnshire, in east England, are immigrants from the ten ex-communist countries that joined the European Union in the 2000s. With its streets dotted by Polish cafes and Baltic food shops, Boston is almost unrecognisable from the town which listed 249 Germans as its biggest foreign population at the time of Britain's census in 2001. But now Britain is expecting a second wave of immigration from Eastern Europe next year -- this time from Bulgaria and Romania, as the EU lifts restrictions on their 29 million citizens' access to the bloc's labour markets. There are few who view this prospect with more trepidation than the English residents of Boston, where one elementary school already has signs on its gates in five languages. "We'll be foreigners in our own town soon," said Joan, a retired office worker, as she sat on a park bench enjoying a rare patch of winter sun. "I've got neighbours from Eastern Europe and they couldn't be nicer. But we just don't want any more of them." Her English neighbours have a litany of complaints against the town's newer inhabitants, from claims that they put a strain on public services to moans that they frequently drive on the wrong side of the road. Even among the town's existing Eastern European community there are mixed feelings about the new arrivals. "I like it here, and people are nice," said Barbara Sieczkowska, owner of Basia's Pantry which sells imported Polish food. "But there are too many Eastern Europeans here now. There must be 20 shops in Boston selling the same kind of food as mine. It's bad for business." Boston is an extreme example of how free movement of labour within the 27-nation EU has changed the face of Britain over the last decade. When the so-called "A8" countries -- Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Estonia and the Czech Republic -- joined the EU in 2004, Britain was one of just three states to immediately open its labour market to them. As the third biggest economy in Europe, it quickly became a major destination for workers from poor post-communist states. Today, Britain's biggest ethnic communities remain the 7 percent of the population who are of south Asian origin and the 3 percent who are black, a legacy of the country's colonial past. But the 62 million-strong population also includes a million Eastern Europeans. Polish is now Britain's most widely-spoken language after English. -- Return of the 'nasty party'? -- When Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, Britain joined several other states in restricting the new members' access to their labour markets until January 2014. But with less than a year to go, right-wing British newspapers are whipping up fears that "floods of beggars" will sweep in from Bulgaria and Romania, two of the EU's poorest members. Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives, who have tried for years to shake off their image as Britain's "nasty party", are now toughening their talk on immigration. Last week Cameron said Britain was reviewing immigrants' access to the welfare system to ensure that the country is not a "soft touch". The hostility has offended some on the other side of the continent, with one Romanian news website running a tongue-in-cheek campaign encouraging Britons to "come on over". The British government refuses to give a prediction for the size of the Romanian and Bulgarian influx, but newspapers claim it could be hundreds of thousands of people. "There is simply no reliable way of knowing how many people are going to arrive," Scott Blinder, of Oxford University's Migration Observatory, told AFP. There are reasons to expect either a huge influx or relatively small one, he explained. As Spain and Italy are home to the biggest Romanian and Bulgarian ex-pat communities, some expect emigrants to head there -- or to other countries lifting the restrictions next year, such as France or Germany. But Britain is weathering the economic crisis better than Spain or Italy, and campaign group Migration Watch UK claims Romanians and Bulgarians could be up to nine times better off if they moved here instead of staying at home.