MEET Katalin Ligeti. She’s Hungarian, 33, smart and attractive. She’s the finance director of an American multinational company, has a degree in business and psychology, an MBA, and speaks English and German. She lives in Budapest with her baby son and husband (me) in a spacious Habsburg-era apartment, a couple of minutes’ walk from parliament and the Danube.

And guess what? My wife doesn’t want to move to Britain after May 1 when Hungary joins the European Union. Nor do any of her friends, relatives, work colleagues or passing acquaintances. Don’t believe anything you read in the tabloid and middle-market press about the “hordes” of Central and Eastern Europeans waiting to pour into Britain, to ruthlessly exploit our health and welfare system.

Despite the scandals about one-legged Romanians applying for work permits to teach mountaineering in Britain, the great unspoken truth about the majority of citizens of the ten accession countries is this: they are not coming.

Booming career opportunities for the young and educated in Central and Eastern Europe, fuelled by more than €100 billion of foreign investment since 1989, mean that most Hungarians, Czechs and Poles would rather stay at home. A survey for the European Commission found that only 0.8 per cent of adults in the accession countries had a “firm intention” to migrate in the next five years. The most committed to leaving were from Poland, where one in a hundred adults definitely plans to move. Those least likely to migrate were from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The study, Migration Trends in an Enlarged Europe, concluded that about 220,000 immigrants a year would move from the former communist countries to the 15 existing member states. That is about the same number of people who left Hungary after the 1956 uprising. Or less than 15,000 immigrants leaving each of the 15 countries. I think Europe — and even Britain — can cope with that. Ironically, labour migration within Hungary, or the lack of it, is a problem. Hungarians are unwilling to move from the poor eastern region of the country to the booming western half, let alone relocate abroad.

Which is a shame, because an influx of well-educated, cultured and multilingual Europeans could only boost Britain’s cultural and intellectual life. In the last century Budapest alone gave us Arthur Koestler, author of the seminal work on Communism Darkness at Noon; the famed conductor Sir Georg Solti and even Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect whose house in Hampstead so enraged the writer Ian Fleming that he named a Bond villain after him. Now I admit that after 12 years based in, or covering, former communist countries, I have probably gone a bit native. But sometimes I do wonder why I bothered trying to explain events in this half of the Continent when the expansion of the European Union has triggered such old-fashioned racism and idiotic prejudices across much of the British press.

There is always a place for tough, accurate reporting, because there is much to discuss in these tumultuous times. For example, a cynic might argue that civil liberties and open borders aside, the accession countries have merely exchanged rule by Moscow apparatchiks for those of Brussels eurocrats. Or we could debate the need for labour mobility in a global economy. These are discussions worth having. Instead, asylum seekers, economic migrants and criminals on the run from eight distinct countries are merged into a frightening amorphous mass that is poised to “swamp us” in some kind of Mitteleuropean Freudian deluge.

The Daily Express worked itself into hysteria, screaming that tens of thousands of “work-shy immigrants” are preparing to pour into Britain from Slovakia. Would they be the same “work-shy” immigrants who serve Express readers their coffees and clean their offices? The hysteria seems to grow the closer it gets to May 1. Yesterday the Daily Mail ran the headline “Benefits Britain here we come”, referring to an interview with a gypsy family in Slovakia.

The frenzy about the expansion of the European Union is profoundly depressing. I used to think that easy and cheaper air travel, the Channel Tunnel, foreign holidays, the collapse of communism, even the changing Europeanised British palate, would all help to open up people’s minds. I hoped this process would eventually spread to the lands that used to be behind the Iron Curtain and speed their reintegration. It seems that I was wrong.

As they say in Germany, the Berlin Wall is gone, but the wall in the head remains.

Adam LeBor’s biography of Slobodan Milosevic is published in paperback by Bloomsbury, priced £8.99