LONDON — Sitting on a wall outside a Wickes hardware store overlooking London's choking South Circular traffic artery, a dozen or so men wait for passersby to pick them up for work.

It’s Sunday morning in Catford, southeast London. A van in the car park is selling bacon sandwiches, tea and coffee. Next door, families make their way into Poundstretcher.

The men looking for work are Romanian, mostly. The going rate for a day’s work is £150, cash, but it’s negotiable. “Let me see the job, I give you good price,” one of the men says when approached by this reporter.

Barely 50 yards away, a new development of “luxury” apartments has been built on the site of the old greyhound-racing stadium. Two-bed apartments go for £525,000, tempting young professionals by the relative affordability and 20-minute direct line to London Bridge.

Similar stories can be found all across the U.K. capital. Already home to almost 9 million people, the city continues to grow, fueled by booming birth rates and immigration.

“London is no good for children. Too many drugs. Everywhere drugs" — Claudiu, Romanian builder in London

In 2018, it is Romanians who make up the biggest number of new arrivals, with a net 46,000 moving to the U.K. each year since restrictions were lifted in 2014.

In all, some 411,000 Romanians now live in the U.K. — up from 42,000 a decade ago — making them the second biggest EU27 nationality in the country, after Poles.

Across town, the north London suburb of Burnt Oak has become home to so many Romanians it has been dubbed “little Romania” by the tabloid press.

Between 3 and 5 million Romanians — from a country with 19.6 million citizens — live and work abroad. Most of them (around 2.6 million) are of working age, representing almost a fifth of the country’s labor force. Around one in 10 of those migrants are now in the U.K.

In Catford, Claudiu, a young builder, misses his home country. He is happy with the money in England, but has no intention of staying long term. He works for a building contractor during the week and then comes to Wickes for extra cash at the weekend.

He lives frugally, he says, never drinking, sending money home and working every hour he can.

He has a wife and daughter in Bucharest. “Romania is the best country in the world,” he says proudly. “It is the most beautiful country in the world. It has the most beautiful girls. I’m serious!” He shows off pictures of his wife and daughter to prove it.

Claudiu is in London to make money — to make his family’s life better and then go home. “London is no good for children,” he says. “Too many drugs. Everywhere drugs.”

Settling down

This is one side of Romania’s English migration story: of itinerant, cash-in-hand labouring, long-distance relationships and homesickness.

But there are other sides — less obvious, often more prosaic, but also more revealing of modern Britain.

It is the story of Romanians who have settled, bought houses and learned English: whose children are in school or looked after by grandparents. Those whose work is by the book and on the books, who benefit from Britain’s flexible labor laws and job-rich economy.

It is the story of Ana Maria Niculae, 33, who moved to the U.K. from Bucharest three years ago with her son and her partner Liviu, settled in Leicester, found work and bought a house — all on £8.35 an hour. (Full disclosure: Ana is the sister-in-law of POLITICO's Carmen Paun, who reported on the emigration pressures facing Romania’s rural towns, including her own, earlier this month.)

“I don’t want to go back to Romania. Life is very expensive and hard there" — Ana, Romanian restaurant worker

In Bucharest, Ana earned around £300 a month as a chef before taking time off after having her son, Adrian. When she returned to her job, the salary was cut to around £180, she says. Once she had paid for the bus and lunch there was little left.

In Leicester, Ana earns 52 pence an hour more than the minimum wage in a restaurant. After working from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. five days a week, she takes home around £1,300 a month after tax, or around £18,000 a year.

She enjoys her work. “I don’t want to go back to Romania,” she says. “Life is very expensive and hard there. It is my country, it is where I was born, but this is the reality. Here, in England, my employers treat me well. Maybe people in England are not as warm as they are in Romania, but they are respectful, they ask me how I am doing, how I am feeling. They understand if you don’t feel well you don’t have to come in to work.”

These things are important. Food is also free at work — two meals a day, as well as coffee and juice.

She says there are “many” Romanians in Leicester but she has never been on the receiving end of racism.

Her partner also enjoys life in England. Liviu, 39, works for Amazon as a delivery driver six days a week. He would do seven, but Amazon does not allow it.

Liviu is usually out of the house by 7 a.m., working until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. He is paid as a private company, allowing him to earn around £1,000 a week before tax, although without some of the benefits and protections of an employment contract.

Migration boom

To some, this is evidence of a flexible, successful economy attracting workers from across Europe. To others, it is the story of a dysfunctional, zero-hours work culture importing cheap labor from abroad — one of the drivers of the Brexit vote.

The Resolution Foundation, a left-leaning think tank whose director Torsten Bell was former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s policy guru, has spent time looking at Britain’s liberal labor laws, low wages and high immigration.

The foundation’s senior economic analyst, Stephen Clarke, says Brexit poses a challenge to the way the economy is set up.

“One of the issues Brexit will force out into the open is the question of to what extent the immigration into the country we have seen was permanent or temporary," he says. "Right now, we don’t have a great sense of how many of those who came in the mid 2000s have left ... The idea that people were super-charging their earnings for five or 10 years before moving back doesn’t appear to be panning out. Many are staying and even bringing their families over with them.”

“It will be interesting to see if the permanent migration will turn into itinerant migration, affecting all these sectors of the economy which have become very reliant on migrant labor,” Clarke says.

Clarke says the awkward truth is that for the minimum wage in the U.K. “you can buy a better migrant than you can a British worker.”

A Pole or Romanian applying for a building job in Leicester or Catford is likely to be motivated, young, healthy and, often, well-educated. An unemployed Brit may not be any of these things — or they would likely already have a job.

For the U.K., the result has been a decade-long migration boom.

“In England there are lots of immigrants and they make good workers. The people from England are not like me, they do not like to work so much" — Ana

While the numbers of new arrivals have fallen from the peak levels of 2015 and 2016, the net figure has plateaued at around 270,000 over the last couple of years.

Of the 270,000, only 90,000 were from the EU over the last year, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Around half of the 90,000 are from the EU15 — shorthand for Western Europe. The numbers coming from further east have trickled to a halt, with as many leaving as arriving each year. The rest come from the newest EU members, Romania and Bulgaria.

Are Ana and Claudiu worried about Brexit?

Claudiu is happy to look for work elsewhere in Europe if necessary, so cares little. Ana has a residency permit so is not concerned she will have to leave, but she still thinks Brexit is stupid.

“This is a very big mistake,” she says. “In England there are lots of immigrants and they make good workers. The people from England are not like me, they do not like to work so much."