They're European migrants who rarely work, contribute little or nothing to their new home, take up beds in hospitals and don't bother to learn the language.

The Brits in Spain - there could be as many as a million of them - do seem to try their best to live up to almost every dubious tabloid stereotype of EU nationals in the UK.

They even, in an echo of red top headlines about Britain as a safe haven for foreign criminals, have their own gangsters, thugs and spivs.

It isn't, after all, called the Costa del Crime for nothing.

But the British expats on the Costas - even the many pensioners who some Spaniards now see as a drain on health services - are just enjoying the same EU freedom of movement as the younger and working Poles and Latvians who have taken their place here.

The great churn of people around our continent and our world isn't going to be reversed.

And the EU isn't just one of many causes of this; it is the means to make the new reality work.

Take Scottish thugs hiding out in Spain. The EU is the biggest and best way we have to get them back.

European Arrest Warrants or EAWs mean Police Scotland can fast-track the extradition of Costa del Crime crooks right back home.

More: this month the UK became part of the Schengen borders deal that means the details of anyone wanted on an EAW anywhere in the EU are in Britain's Police National Computer.

Scottish courts expect to catch so many extra foreign criminals as a result that they have trained extra sheriffs to extradite them.

So far, so good. The EU and international bodies - such as Europol and Eurojust - help to pay for investigations and sort out jurisdictional conflicts. The systems is getting better by the day.

But there is a risk: a peculiar brand of British nationalist politics. Police know this, so do prosecutors.

Back in 2012 this paper reported that senior detectives were appalled at plans, then mooted by the Tories, to scrap EAWs.

I remember one officer in particular as he ranted about the very idea of getting rid of what he thought of as a basic law enforcement tool.

He as a seasoned detective who had faced up to gangsters and eyeballed rapists. But he knew his real enemy when it came to fighting crime: Eurosceptics.

His horror: that borders were open for criminals but would be closed, by the Conservatives, for police. Ms May relented on EAWs.

Now, with an in/out referendum on the EU being offered by the Tories - and demanded by potential Commons allies in UKIP and the DUP - the continent's crime-fighting abilities are under threat again.

Tories and the rest of the right, including Kippers, like to be seen as tough on law and order.

Prime Minister David Cameron may want to stay in Europe.

But his proposed big vote, by 2017, threatens an exit from EU-wide law enforcement institutions that protect all British citizens from criminals, whether they are at home, or retired on the Costas.

Has any party ever been quite so soft on crime?