You don't know what you've got till it's gone

The mass exodus of migrant workers returning to their homelands is bad news for the countries they leave behind

Following the ascension of a number of former communist countries to the EU in 2004, a veritable army of migrant workers pursued the Western dream, leaving their homelands in the hope of acquiring financial rewards available on the other side of the iron curtain.

But it now appears that the worm has turned.

Figures released by the Polish government show that a third of Britain's Polish population is expected to return home over the next 12 months. This view has been corroborated by Wiktor Monzczynski, a spokesman for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain who confirmed that the Polish population on Britain’s shores has fallen and will continue to do so.

This has been mirrored in Ireland, another popular destination for migrant workers. With the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin estimating that 35,000 more eastern European workers will follow the 30,000 that have already left the country during the next year.

What does the return home of the millions of eastern Europeans mean for the countries they are leaving behind?

The service and hospitality industries will feel their absence acutely with data from the Workers Registration Service in the UK showing that between 2004 and 2006, 60,000 migrant workers were employed in a role in those sectors. It also reveals that nearly 40 percent were working in elementary occupations compared with only 10 percent of the home grown working population employed in similar roles.

If a large proportion of these migrant workers do return home there is some debate as to whether there is the desire or inclination for these roles to be filled by home grown workers.

A report by the BBC in March revealed that those who were unemployed were reluctant to work the jobs that migrant workers had filled, preferring instead to claim benefits.

In the report a group of unnamed jobseekers in Peterborough declared their intentions saying "I'd prefer to sign-on than do that." and "I don't want to work in a cornfield."

It is not just as providers of services that the absence of the returning workers will be felt but also as consumers. In 2006 the Centre for Economics and Business Research calculated that the Polish migrant worker population of the UK had a combined spending power of between £3.5 and £4bn. What is startling is the attitudes of many Britons, who could never seem to condone positive immigration policy.

An influx of products into the UK retail marketplace aimed at tapping into this spending power followed with supermarket chains such as Tesco and ASDA adding nearly 100 Polish food products to their stock in 2006.

With up to as many as 400,000 Polish migrant workers expected to the leave the UK in the next 12 months the already contracting retail market looks set to lose a large proportion of that estimated £4bn spending power, a course of action that could cause inflation to rise further. Can Britain afford to lose the Poles?