Community workers are being drafted in to three towns to help them cope with an influx of eastern Europeans.

Littlehampton, Bognor and Chichester will get the new community workers following a £93,000 grant to help integrate the estimated 10,000 migrant workers from eastern Europe into British society.

Existing efforts to help promote integration include police in Arun district learning Polish phrases. But more needs to be done to welcome this positive influx into our society, as Miranda Cormell, chairwoman of the Arun Cross Cultural Advisory Group explains.

One of my eastern European friends recently said to me: "Miranda, we're all looking for our own place under the sun."

I am reminded that my uncle and his young family emigrated to Australia after the Second World War and a generation later my own brother followed in his footsteps at the tender age of 17 after a childhood spent in Africa.

Going back still further, how many thousands sought a new life in America?

And people still today emigrate to Australia looking for a better life or buy second homes in Europe or retire to France or Spain.

We hear little criticism of this and we accept people are within their rights to seek such emigration.

Similarly, the current wave of eastern European migrant workers coming to the coastal strip in Arun and, of course, other parts of the country, have a right to be here.

So, whatever our views on current UK immigration policy, let's extend a welcome to our new neighbour, let's smile at the person speaking another language behind us in the supermarket queue and let's try to engage with the group of eastern Europeans in our workplace, even if we have to make a fool of ourselves trying to say "hello" in Polish.

A colleague and I teach English to about 60 of these new arrivals in the course of a week.

They are consistently charming, eager to learn the language and extremely hard working. Some of them come straight to our evening classes from a 12-hour shift or even to our morning class after working all night.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest migrant workers bring a net economic gain to an area - they pay tax and national insurance and spend their money locally but, because they are mostly young and healthy, make very little use, for instance, of our health services.

Many big employers will freely admit they could not survive without migrant labour and how many of us now have relatives in residential homes being cared for by Polish and other foreign nationals?

For more than two years I have been working with CVS Arunwide and other agencies in Arun, looking at the needs of migrant workers and how we can both allay the fears of the host population and help people to integrate, as well as providing people with helpful information in their own languages. Much has been done but much is still to be done.

A boost to this work is money recently set aside by a county-wide partnership to extend already successful work with the Portuguese communities in Littlehampton and Selsey and additionally employ two or more bi-lingual eastern European community workers.

When these workers are in place they should not only be able to provide more effective one-to-one advice to individuals but also have the time and the language skills to broker stronger relationships and links between the different communities and the different agencies in Arun.

I hope we can look forward to a brighter future for our area where we can appreciate and celebrate diversity, learn from one another and make Arun a healthy and welcoming community in which to live.

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