BERLIN: The European Union’s eastward expansion will bring an influx of about five million immigrants to western Europe by 2020, according to an authoritative German study.

The report, commissioned

by the non-governmental German Migration Council, bolsters the argument of expansion’s opponents, who say the wider labour market due to be introduced in 2004 will put a huge strain on current EU members.

One of its authors, Professor Klaus Bade, director of the institute of migration research and intercultural studies at Osnabruck University, said that between 700,000 and 900,000 eastern Europeans were “already mentally sitting on their packed suitcases and ... ready to start out for the west’.

The figure of five million is based on surveys in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, and a range of migration studies from the mid-90s to the present.

Most of the potential migrants want to go to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland (not an EU member but with some common rights), Austria and Italy, the report says.

Poland has already reached agreement with the EU that its citizens will not be allowed to work in other EU countries for the first seven years of membership and other

EU members will not be allowed to buy land in Poland for 12 years.

The trend, is not expected to be long term, the authors say: since the reduction in population growth in eastern Europe is expected to continue in the following decades, the level of migration will ebb after the initial surge.

The report coincides with the German president Johannes Rau signing a law which allows a controlled flow of skilled workers into the country, including people from outside the EU.

Immigration is likely to be a dominant theme in September’s general election, the conservative opposition to Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s government arguing that Germany can ill afford to take in more foreigners when its unemployment level is so high: currently about 10 per cent.

Up to 850,000 migrants enter Germany each year. Almost 12 per cent of the population, 10 million people, are of non-German origin the report says. Illegal immigration should not be fought by barring off parts of Europe, it says.

Rainer Munz, professor of demography at Humboldt University in Berlin, the report’s co-author, said: “This would be a battle of false arguments.”

In the 1990s the US poured more money than ever into its attempt to barricade its border with Mexico, “but at the same time a record number of illegal immigrants entered the country,” he said.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.