European panel: Marcel de Vries

MEET THE PANEL Name: Marcel de Vries Age: 31 Lives: The Hague, Netherlands Works: Financial consultant The EU to me in 10 words or less: "EU leaders should tell people what they really want" Watch message

I do not believe workers from Romania and Bulgaria should be allowed to move freely within member states - yet.

I don't particularly have anything against any worker from any country.

But I do feel that countries in western Europe have already saturated their labour markets.

Many western European countries have high unemployment. Why allow even more workers to come here and put even more pressure on wages and extra strain on our welfare states? We've yet to absorb the previous stream from the last round of accession.

I read about someone here complaining that painting firms were increasingly hiring foreign painters and were no longer offering apprenticeships to local youths interested in that line of work.

Training people is, after all, more expensive than hiring people from abroad willing to work longer for less.

EUROPEAN PANEL Viktorija Spurina Peter Langh Gerry Harris Marcel De Vries Tom O' Sullivan Joachim Korte-Bernard

I have also heard many negative attitudes from people of different political backgrounds towards Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU.

It seems to me that European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and his people want to use Romanian and Bulgarian accession as a pretext to press for ratification of the rejected constitutional treaty.

I would advise against this. A second referendum would bury the treaty for good.

As for the job market, I myself have got little to worry about. I work in a sector that is not affected much by the stream of migrants coming this way.

But I am worried about the future of many of our own unskilled workers.

I fear they will be the ones to lose out. Romanians and Bulgarians will just have to wait.

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