Super Soaraway Migrant Scare Story

The cheaper end of the Fourth Estate knows how to frighten its readership, and for much of that demographic, nothing frightens like immigration. Migrants, we are routinely told by lame and overmonied hacks like Fat Dick Littlejohn, go to the top of housing lists, get free cars, obtain benefits that “hard working Brits” are somehow denied, and of course are Foreign.

Feeding into this fear today are Rupe’s downmarket troops at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun, who have invented a mass migration of Hungarians under the less than subtle headline “EU flood may wreck migrant limit plan” (it’s a “flood” because you have to be scared, and chucking “EU” into the mix makes it doubly scary).

The Sun has decided that Hungary’s Government, which may grant citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living outside that country, is about to unleash a wave of immigration into the UK, though its assertion, “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”, carries suitable caveats.

So what is the reality? Will there be a mass movement of Hungarians to the UK? Sadly for Rupe’s downmarket troops, the figures don’t back them up: there are around 80,000 Hungarians in the UK, while Germany – where the economy is doing rather better than ours – has half as many again. Austria has 40,000, it’s the country next door to Hungary, and has historic ties to it.

And for those who want to migrate further than Germany or Austria, the Hungarian communities of the USA and Canada number more than 1.8 million. The Hungarian Diaspora even includes over a million spread across South America. So why would there be a particular attraction to the UK?

The short answer is that there is no provable or likely attraction. But the Murdoch press has papers to sell, and frightening the readers is as reliable a sales pitch as any.