TWO things reliably happen on a Thursday that affect the life of an Economist political reporter: it is the day of the week when Britain traditionally holds elections, and it is press day for this newspaper. This week's print column, therefore, was written before today's wave of local and regional elections and the national referendum on whether to change the rules used to elect members of the House of Commons. But it will be published as polls close. The column is, as a result, about another news event that took place in the last few days, unnoticed by most in Britain. On May 1st, Germany and Austria became the last European Union countries to lift transitional controls restricting access to their labour markets for citizens of Poland and seven other ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004.

This column notes an odd thing: in Britain, a clear consensus is emerging at the top of the ruling Conservative and opposition Labour parties that Britain made a terrible mistake opening its labour markets to Poles and other easterners, and should have followed the more restrictive closed-door policies of Germany. Yet in Germany, leading labour market economists argue that the mistake was Germany's, as the decision to impose quotas and work permits on eastern migrants did not stop hundreds of thousands of east and central European migrants from turning up, but merely ensured that lots of them turned up illegally or by unorthodox routes (eg, by declaring themselves self-employed contractors). In contrast, such German economists argue, Britain's image as an open economy attracted a disproportionate share of young, highly skilled or university-educated migrants from Poland and the east. Had Britain imposed controls, Professor Klaus Zimmermann of the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn (IZA), told me: "The German evidence is that you would still have had lots of migrants, but you would have lost the highest-skilled ones."

This is not a guess. The IZA recently published an exhaustive survey of the skills and qualifications of migrants into different west European economies from the 2004 arrivals. Germany attracted older, less qualified migrants than the EU average. Britain attracted an above average proportion of highly-educated migrants. Now, I concede that by opening its labour markets (alone of all the large western European economies) Britain attracted an unusually large number of eastern migrants full stop. It would be outrageously complacent to ignore the strain that migration put on public services and some local communities. But for reasons I set out in the column below, big numbers would have come anyway, if labour markets had not been opened. The newcomers who joined the EU in 2004 were granted free travel rights across the whole club from day one, but not the automatic right to work. And if you open your borders to poorer neighbours but close off legal routes for them to work, you will mostly preside over a rapid expansion in your black market.

That is exactly what happened. I spent five years in Brussels at a time when Belgium was still controlling legal work by Poles and other newcomers, but had to keep its borders open. The visible result in my neighbourhood was a colony of Polish labourers who lived in panel vans in the streets around the Palace of Justice (the country's high court). They did not speak French or Flemish in the main, and worked as the cheapest, most easily exploited sort of casual labourers on building sites. Every now and then the police would conduct a raid and throw a few back over the border. They would return (quite legally) a few days later.

By opening, Britain scooped some of the best talent available. And as Professor Zimmermann sagely notes, a country can never have too many highly-skilled workers. By opening, Britain also avoided an explosion of squalid, exploitative black market labour in its towns and cities. Legal migration by an estimated 1.5m eastern Europeans since 2004 is often accused of acting as a recruiting sergeant for the far right in Britain. Well just try a boom in criminality and black market illegal labour and see what that does to support for the far right, is my response.

Some may say, well this goes to show that EU membership and free movement is the problem: let's seal those borders properly by leaving the club. That, I would venture, would be a sad, self-defeating act for a country that should be seeking to become more not less open to the world, not to mention a specific headache for the hundreds of thousands of Britons now living in places such as Spain and France. EU enlargement to the east was also a rare moral achievement for the union, a club that too often cloaks great selfishness beneath windy declarations of principle.

Here is the column:

TWICE in modern history, Britain has proved a rare friend to Poland, welcoming its people when other Europeans slammed doors shut, declares Wiktor Sotowski, owner of Spitfire, a west London restaurant and shrine to Anglo-Polish amity.

There was the second world war, when Polish airmen flew in the Battle of Britain: Mr Sotowski serves his pierogi and beetroot soup beneath model warplanes, squadron badges and snaps of glowering, bemedalled marshals. Then came 2004, when Poland and seven other ex-communist countries joined the European Union. Alone of the big Western economies, Britain immediately opened its labour markets (as did smaller Ireland and Sweden). Others took longer to do so. Germany and Austria maintained their transitional curbs until May 1st this year, fully seven years after that EU enlargement. The consequences were startling. An estimated 1.5m eastern migrants headed to Britain (though perhaps half later returned home).

“I am so proud of Great Britain,” says Mr Sotowski, visibly moved. Alas, British political leaders do not share his pride. Instead, a cross-party consensus is forming that Britain should have copied the closed-door policies of countries like Germany.

Opening labour markets in 2004, when other large economies imposed restrictions, was a “huge mistake”, says Damian Green, the Conservative immigration minister. Coming after a surge of asylum-seekers in the 1990s, migration from the east contributed to “a catastrophic loss of public confidence in the immigration system”. Importing foreigners, he adds, was a short-term fix to the real challenge: equipping British citizens for work.

Last month, David Cameron defended new migrants against charges of stealing jobs. Migrants, he said, had mostly filled gaps in the labour market left by a welfare system that “paid British people not to work”. But in the same speech, the prime minister took swipes at any new arrivals who were unwilling to integrate, bringing “discomfort and disjointedness” to communities knitted together by shared rituals such as school runs or “the chat down the pub”. Immigration had been too high for too long, Mr Cameron insisted, citing the “huge number” of east Europeans arriving since 2004: transitional controls should have been used to reduce their numbers, and would be applied to all future EU members. (In fact, Britain already imposes labour controls on Bulgarians and Romanians, who joined the EU in 2007: most were likelier to head to Spain or Italy in any case).

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, whose grandparents were Polish refugees, said in April that the previous government “clearly underestimated the number of people coming in from Poland”. Labour had to address voters' fears that incomers were putting pressure on wages and housing—though “some of that is real and some of it isn't,” he delicately noted.

In a democracy, voter angst cannot be ignored. In retrospect, Tony Blair was culpably silent in 2004, failing to explain that he had chosen to increase legal migration into Britain and why. Though Poles are hardly Britain's toughest integration challenge—their popular image is one of devoutly Christian, family-loving, football-mad beer-drinkers with a strong work ethic—the unexpected speed and scale of their arrival caused headaches. They also carried unfamiliar accents and customs (and pierogi) far beyond multicultural hubs such as London to provincial towns and villages whose public services struggled to cope.

But there is a lot of cant about. Mr Green is right that many British people lack skills; it is less clear that excluding Polish plumbers for the past seven years would have improved British craftsmanship. Mr Cameron's recent speech conflated problems of integration (which may involve the second or third generations of migrant families) with the anxieties triggered by competition from newly arrived Polish nannies or Latvian barmaids (who have become integral, in many places, to the school runs and pub chats of which he speaks so lyrically). As for Mr Miliband, studies have found only a limited impact on wages from migration, mostly affecting the lowest paid: the National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimates that the 2004 influx to Britain depressed real wages over the long run by 0.36%.

They would have come anyway

Most important, labour curbs within the EU are a fantasy. All EU countries granted Poland and the other newcomers in 2004 free rights of entry and residence (but not the right to work). Granting free movement was a good thing to do. Enlargement remains the union's greatest achievement, reuniting a continent divided by decades of communist tyranny. But once poorer neighbours enjoy free movement, closing legal routes to work will inevitably result in a bigger black market. This happened in Germany, home to an estimated 400,000 Poles despite tough restrictions. Moreover, the self-employed are excluded from EU transitional controls: “self-employed” easterners in Germany duly doubled in number after 2004. Germany tried easing rules for graduates from the east, but that did not counter its image as a “closed country”, putting off younger, better-educated migrants, says Klaus Zimmermann of the Institute for the Study of Labour, a think-tank in Bonn. Britain became “known for openness”, attracting a much bigger share of young, skilled migrants and graduates than Germany did: a British win, says a rueful Professor Zimmermann.

In short, Britain did the right thing—backing free movement across a united Europe—and then the pragmatic and smart thing: attracting the best-educated who wished to work legally, while pushing lower-skilled migrants (large numbers of whom would have come anyway) into legal, taxable work. Mr Sotowski has reason to be proud of his host country. If British politicians were braver, they would be proud too.