The emotional cost of economic migration

The consequences in at least some ways, however, are much the same: the abandonment of children and teenagers, who are left behind to care for themselves or to be cared for by other relatives, usually grandparents. My own elderly parents are currently being looked after by a mother from Lithuania, whose teenage children will not have seen her for at least six months.

There are many perspectives on such circumstances. They range from some sense of appalling injustice that this is the price to be paid by our poorer neighbours in Europe now that they are able to "benefit" from the better incomes further to the West (even if these are still around the minimum wage for those countries), to a sense of self-satisfaction that the free market has finally bestowed such "opportunities" on those who were for so long trapped by the command economies of communism.