Europe needs more, not fewer, economic migrants despite public fears and high unemployment in core West European countries, EU Labour and Social Affairs Commissioner Vladimir Spidla said on Wednesday

Europe needs more, not fewer, economic migrants despite public fears and high unemployment in core West European countries, EU Labour and Social Affairs Commissioner Vladimir Spidla said on Wednesday. In an interview with Reuters, the former Czech prime minister disputed suggestions that the new EU executive headed by Jose Manuel Barroso was dominated by economic liberals uninterested in preserving social rights or public services. “Over the next 20 years, there will be 20 million fewer workers in Europe, even including migrants,” he said, pointing to an ageing population and falling birth rates. “Naturally, if you only look at the next two weeks, things look different. But in the EU we have to work on the long term and we definitely need immigration,” said Spidla, who was to set out the Commission’s new “Social Agenda” later on Wednesday. He acknowledged that advocating greater labour migration was politically difficult at a time when unemployment in Germany has topped five million, reaching the highest level since the 1930s, but said it would be wrong to blame immigrants for the problem. “Would the post-World War Two German economic miracle have been possible without ’guest workers’? Certainly not,” he said. Germany’s neighbour, Austria, with roughly the same proportion of immigrants, had fewer than 4.5 percent unemployed, about half the German level, he noted.