Reality versus Fiction? or Reality and Fiction

"The biggest issue is that some see Britain as a soft touch. They assume people will want to come here because they'll get an easy ride here."
Victoria Honeyman, University of Leeds politics lecturer

Britain has a very well developed social security safety network. In fact, those on welfare and living in assisted housing very often live with more financial ease than the working poor. But that is Britain's system, one the government is doubtless proud of maintaining, despite the criticisms that often come their way. After all, even those people who do migrate to Britain because they wish to take advantage of its generosity could go elsewhere, to the Scandinavian countries, for example, for similar generous treatment.

How to nudge people off the public teat when they are capable of extending themselves to find remunerative work to enable them to live independently of welfare is another matter altogether. Why should they when they feel they are entitled to any and all social welfare as a result of having had the intelligence of cupidity-sans-labour by making such an entitled selection? Where former grand estates have been turned over to large, and burgeoning families whose birth-rates far exceed that of other Brits.

"We're importing a crime wave from Romania and Bulgaria", blasted a British headline. They were quoting a Conservative Member of Parliament who informed that august body (the British Parliament) that most pickpockets trawling the streets of the country were from Romania. This is typical tabloid fare, and it appears to be working very well. No one actually has an idea how many Romanians and Bulgarians will end up filtering through to Britain, but the generous welfare state is certainly seen as a draw.

Both countries joined the EU in 2007, resulting in over 100,000 migrants already working in Britain under work restrictions limiting jobs access and state benefits. But those restrictions are set to be lifted in two days' time -- January 1 -- granting migrants from both countries similar rights as other EU nations, enabling them to live and work freely across Europe's wide swath of EU membership. And since Britain, although it chafes at certain infringements on its sovereignty as a EU member, is a member it must abide by its general rules.

In 2004 when Poland and other former countries aligned with communism under the USSR joined the EU it was estimated that several thousand would make their way to Britain. A swell of a whopping one million Poles made that transition. But since that time there has been an acknowledgement that the country's economy was aided by their working presence. That fact hasn't worked to ameliorate fears of a pending invasion of Bulgarians and Romanians.

Countries of Eastern Europe are known to be relatively impoverished. The most sadly impoverished demographic that of the Roma. And those same tabloid items accuse the Roma living in Britain currently of a wide range of social ills, including eating cats and conducting an illegal baby market. That, opposed to the statement by the Center for Economics and Business Research that migration is one factor to aid Britain eclipse Germany to become the most robust economy by 2030 in Europe.