Perhaps if you can look at it in a slightly different light, taking the US as an example, there are 50 states in the mainland USA which is a gigantic land mass where people can travel between states by car, plane, train, bus, and there are also a few territories offshore that people can either take a plane or a boat to, offshore territories which when combined aren't much bigger than the UK, while Europe is also a large land mass, with the exception of the UK and Ireland, which are islands, like the American offshore territories.
A member of any US territory or state, has practically free access to any of the other US territories or states, and the same principle applies with the EU member states.
The basic principles of the EU constitution are that when states become member states, populations can shift and migrate across, through and between other member states, kind of like how people can shift between the US states. It allows for social mobility across all Europe, which is great for graduates, working citizens and people who fancy living in a different European country. For instance, you or I (two people who have British citizenship) can go to France and receive the French benefits and settle in France to live and work, the same way a Frenchman could come to the UK and do likewise. And I, as a person who intends to spend a portion of my life living in different European states, am happy that I have such an opportunity. If I go to France with a job, I can get the same rights as a Frenchy, and if I fall on hard times, I have some leeway what with benefits and help to get back into work. Really, in that regard, as far as European Union citizens are concerned, immigration between member states is not very much different than a US citizen travelling between US states. EU citizens have, more or less, the same rights in each member state as their do in their home state. And an interesting fact regarding the UK's place in this: the immigrant population of the UK actually pay, relative to their population size, more taxes (when taken as a whole) than born-and-bred British citizens, and they are also, relative to their size, nearly three times as likely to have university degrees, so I don't necessarily think the point about weak immigration policies is valid. Perhaps the point about economic migrants is more valid. I do know that many asylum seekers (and remember, those aren't the same as EU immigrants) come to the UK in order to escape certain situations in their home countries, and they end up not working, at least for a considerable term, but I'm not sure that this is the big issue that people make it out to be, because the UK is only taking less than 20,000 asylum seekers (not EU immigrants) per year.
The numbers of Syrian or African asylum seekers who are currently coming to the UK, which is only a few thousand, is really not a fair portrayal of the entire immigrant population, nor is it a significant drain on resources when we consider the entire immigrant population as a whole, compared to the UK born nationals. I have dual citizenship between the UK and Ireland and, I suppose, the reason that I tend to get to heated about this topic is because I see a very black-and-white, staunch nationalistic anti-immigration attitude a lot, but in both countries (the UK and Ireland) the situation is fairly similar: it's actually the born-and-bred citizens who, proportionally, are more of a drain on the economy than immigrants are.
I don't know how many times I've been in Belfast city and walked by a house with the words "Polish, get out" or "No n*****s are welcome here" spray-painted on the front wall, and when you watch the news and read the papers, there's a great irony in it:
"Polish family of five forced out of their home by threatening thugs.
Mr and Mrs Baczewski, residents of the *insert area here*, came home from work on Friday afternoon after receiving a call from their babysitter notifying them that the police had been called, due to a small group of men and women gathering outside their home. The group began throwing stones at the windows and terrorizing the children. The mob, identified as a group of unemployed twenty-somethings, shouted anti-Polonist abuse at the childminder while the two young children were sat terrified in the living room".
The people who are most against immigration, at least where I come from, continually talk about how immigrants are "stealing our jobs" and "draining our economy", and those same people, more often than not, are the type of unemployed, uneducated dimwits who have the free time on a Friday afternoon to terrorize an innocent young family, instead of getting themselves to a college or an employment office.
I have a few close friends who are foreign and I know that they have endured some really tough times trying to educate themselves and get by in the UK, because even when they work and study, they aren't entitled to the same benefits as UK citizens until they have served their citizenship period. They would get serious abuse about their nationality, about being immigrants, at least once a fortnight when we were in college together, and the both of them worked two jobs at times, while they studied. So it's very much something that gets under my skin when immigrants are painted with this "lazy scroungers" brush. I know from experience that it isn't the case.
