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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Because you're probably a high-paid professional (reasonable assumption for a HN user) and are not considering staying in the country illegally after you arrive.

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Bulgarians have had all this time (10 years) to go live in the UK legally. Why would they suddenly rush to leave everything behind and go live there illegally? It doesn't make any sense.

Is this just straight up racism? What is special about these two specific countries that doesn't apply to any of the other ones in the EU?

Decades of tabloid news have convinced Britons that the UK is great place to live in spite of the UK having some of the poorest places in the northern EU.

http://inequalitybriefing.org/graphics/briefing_43_UK_region...

Romania and Bulgaria are the last joiners to the EU (2007) (disregarding the much smaller Croatia) and the last two EU countries to be given the right to work in the UK without a work visa (2014) (don't know about Croatia in this respect).

Their citizens are perceived to be the least desirable EU citizens to have as immigrants.

Size of economy.

You are absolutly right, and few days ago there a proof for your theory - more people are leaving now UK than comming to leave here

That isn't true, net migration fell but it is still positive: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/23/net-migratio...

Why wouldn't they stay, legally or ilegally, in the equally rich Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Austria? All of which are closer to the origin countries than the UK.

Or why wouldn't they go in the slightly-less-richer, but culturally closer Spain or Italy? Especially since the weather is much nicer over there :)

As a British guy in Finland I can say that the reason many people moved to the UK was because of the perception of easy work, easy integration, and good practices.

Those things might exist in other countries, I don't know of them personally, but I do know that moving to Finland is non-trivial. The language is hard, and unless you speak it you've only got unskilled jobs to find - with high competition. Gaining residency pretty much necessitates having a job too, which makes it all a bit circular.

I'm settled here for the foreseeable future, although I have to wait another couple of years before I qualify for citizenship.

Actually, customer facing unskilled jobs are harder to get while only speaking English.

I could believe that; I was thinking of things like cleaning and seasonal work such as fruit-picking.

English language, maybe? Obviously a lot of those other countries have very high numbers of English speakers, but most good jobs still require you to speak the native language.

Why would "half a country" risk insecurity and (occasional) hostility from locals, to remain illegally in the UK, when there are quite a few other viable options within the EU?

You're confusing right to live with right to travel. You don't need the right to live in order to go to the UK and work illegally.

> Because you're probably a high-paid professional (reasonable assumption for a HN user)

But the article is not about people from hacker news, it's about any EU citizen.

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