MUNICH — Europe is experiencing a huge wave of migration between east and west. This movement resembles the Great Migrations (Volkerwanderung) of the fourth to sixth centuries.
Within the first year of Romania's accession to the European Union on Jan. 1, 2007, for example, roughly a million Romanians migrated to Italy and Spain. More than 800,000 East Europeans have become workers in Britain over the past four years, most coming from Poland. Indeed, in the last two years alone, 1.5 million Poles emigrated, and overall probably more than 2 million have done so since Poland's EU accession in 2004.
On a smaller scale, the migration of Ukrainians to the Czech Republic, Bulgarians to Turkey, and British citizens to Spain is also noteworthy.