Chicken Little Europe.(expanded European Union may cause cross-border movement for jobs)(Column)

An expanded European Union should mean wider horizons. But for Milan Kubek, chairman of the Czech doctors' union, that's a mixed blessing. When the frontiers come down next year, he predicts that nurses and physicians will leave in droves, lured westward by jobs. There they can earn up to 10 times what they do at home, where salaries average just $1,200 a month, he says. "There's nothing to stop them leaving."

Across the border in neighboring Slovakia, Dusan Badi, chairman of a local Roma group, talks about migrating as well. After years of persecution he plans to leave for Britain with his wife and seven children. "We want to go West, where minorities are tolerated and have better opportunities."

Isolated cases of disaffection--or harbingers of a mass cross-border movement that threatens Europe's economic stability? The question is pressing. Next year 10 new members will join the EU, including eight from Eastern and Central Europe. In theory, that gives 73 million new citizens the right to live and work wherever they choose. Small wonder there's anxiety in the shaky economies of the West. Doomsayers foresee hordes of migrants snapping up jobs at cutthroat wages. Locals will be forced out of work; unions will lose bargaining power. Says Ursula Engelen-Kefer, deputy head of the German Federation of Labor Unions: "We cannot open the floodgates to workers from the East with millions of Germans out of work."

The pols see the danger. Germany, Austria and others are using exemptions in the EU enlargement treaty to deny workers from the new member states the unfettered right to work in their territory for seven years. And though welcome in places like Denmark, they won't be entitled to welfare benefits. Among Europe's major economies, only Britain will offer open entry to the Easterners--but not without controversy. Britain faces flood of new immigrants, the Daily Express reported recently. Migration Watch UK, an immigration lobby group, estimates that Britain is already on course to take in more than 2 million newcomers from around the world over the next decade. "For a small and crowded island, it's shortsighted and extremely foolish," says the group's chairman, Andrew Green. Cosmopolitan London, critics warn, could become a migrant honey pot, straining already overstretched public services.

At least that's how the scaremongers tell it. In fact, much of the alarmist talk is just that--empty talk. According to a slew of recent studies, worries about an immigrant flood are vastly overblown. Yes, average earnings in the new member states are often only a fifth of those in the West. But that does not mean folks are aching to leave. Indeed, the very reason Britain opened its arms to the new immigrants is precisely because it realized so few would actually come, says Roger Vickerman, an economics professor at the University of Kent. According to the EU's projections, no more than 150,000 people a year will leave their native countries to go West. In a union of nearly 500 million, that's hardly a flood.

Opinion polls confirm the assessment. In the Czech Republic, Labor and Social Affairs Minister Zdenek Skromach says his country's surveys predict "minimal" migration. "Money is not the main motivation for Czechs," he says. Poland is no different. Unemployment may be running at 20 percent, --but just 5 percent of the population say they would definitely ...