One of the tools that right-wing elements use to control the public debate about government spending and to justify their attack on public deficits is migration. There are many aspects to this public manipulation that invokes raw fear, ignorance and prejudice among the population. One of the elements, which plays on job insecurity and the range of fiscal myths that characterise the neoliberal era, is the claim that so-called ‘benefit tourism’ is rife and if left unchecked will bankrupt national governments and lead to higher burdens on ‘taxpayers’. So we are often told that migrants from poorer nations move to access welfare benefits that are superior to those offered by their own nations and that these movements are parasitic in nature and do not advance the interests of the host country citizens. Last week (December 10, 2015), the Irish-based EU organisation, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) released a report – Social dimension of intra-EU mobility: Impact on public services – which examines “the extent to which mobile citizens from central and eastern European Member States … take up benefits and services in nine host countries” by “mobile citizens from 10 central and eastern European Member States” (the so-called EU10 mobile citizens). The Report should be read by all those who wish to contribute to this debate or understand what the facts are. Essentially, the Report finds that mobile citizens from poorer nations have lower take-up rates of welfare support in host countries than natives. That really should be the end of the ‘benefit tourist’ assertions. But then most of these public debates are not based on evidence or logic.