Another installment in my semi-regular “I read ConHome so you don’t have to” feature…
A few days ago, Conservative Home linked to this article in the Sun. The angle ConHome chose to take on it was… interesting.

Half a million Hungarians could come to Britain
“PM David Cameron vowed to cap net immigration – currently 200,000 a year – at “tens of thousands”. But the influential Institute for Public Policy Research says that does not take account of the flow from European countries. About 500,000 ethnic Hungarians living in non-EU countries could head to Britain…A Sun investigation has found that 300,000 living in Serbia and 160,000 in the Ukraine are among those who could seek to come here on Hungarian passports.”

A few things strike me about this.

• Quite how the Sun has decided that the free movement of people (as well as of course the important things like capital, goods and services) in the European Union is news is beyond me. Britain joined the EU in 1973, and thus this news item is about… oh, 38 years out of date. Even if you could argue that the government’s plans to cut immigration are more recent, most papers picked up on this particular point several months ago.
• I particularly like the ConHome sensationalist headline. Not even the Sun dared go with “500k Hungarians expected to flock to Britain” – that was a small part of the article. What’s actually behind this headline is the fact that Hungary is extending the right to Hungarian citizenship to around 460,000 ethnic Hungarians who currently live outside the EU. So basically what ConHome is telling us is that all those people are going to claim their Hungarian passports, after which they’ll up sticks from places where they and their families have lived for centuries, and all move to Britain. Now, even if we assume that indeed all of those people decide to move (highly unlikely!) the EU has 27 member states; even if we thought that proportionaltely more would come to Britain simply because Britain is one of the larger countries, there’s no reason to think that more than about 55,000 would come to Britain. So basically, the assumption that all 500,000 of these people would move to Britain is about as realistic as saying all of Germany could decide to up sticks and come here next. “80 million Germans about to flock to Britain” would be a much more fun headline, and about as accurate, don’t you think?
• And just in case a realistic look at the numbers hasn’t stopped you from quivering in your boots with fear of all the flocking immigrants, I also love the Sun’s explanation of “how citizens of struggling countries such as Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal will flock to Britain seeking work if the UK’s economy does better than the eurozone.” Might I point out that Germany’s growth projections look quite healthy right now, and they have the lowest unemployment rate since reunification, while this government is cutting public sector jobs, raising sales taxes which is highly likely to negatively impact consumer demand, and generally doing all within its power to drive us back into recession? Now, which of these two countries looks like a more attractive destination?
• And lest we forget, the largest wave of intra-EU migration is still Britons moving to Spain. Ho hum.