David Cameron: numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians will be nothing like Poles in 2004 When a country joins the European Union you can put in place transitional controls. You can say to that country, "You can't all come here for the first seven years." The last government, when Poland and a lot of other countries joined, didn't put those controls in place. And because other countries did, we did have an enormous amount of people from Poland and those other countries. This time because the transitional controls have been put in we are not lifting the restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria alone, it's happening right across Europe. So I don't think we'll have anything like the situation we had in the Polish situation. Migration Watch, the thinktank, published figures earlier this year suggesting that 50,000 Romanians and Bulgarians will come here every year. Despite being paid £30,000 of public money, Niesr was not explicitly asked to produce any estimates of how many people might come to the UK. However, the same think tank in 2011 suggested that around 21,000 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria will come here each year.