What's important to Migration Watch and the Express is not a baby boom as such, but a 'foreign baby boom'.
What’s important to Migration Watch and the Express is not a baby boom as such, but a ‘foreign baby boom’
According to Migration Watch and the Daily Express, my fiance is a ‘hidden migrant’ despite being born in Britain and spending her entire life in this country.
So, in fact, are plenty of other people, including two of Nigel Farage’s children and most non-white Britons.
As the Express reports:
‘New arrivals and their offspring accounted for 3.8 million out of a 4.6 million expansion in numbers in the UK between 2001 and 2012.
‘Official figures hide the true picture because they fail to include births to immigrant parents, according to Migration Watch, the pressure group. Unless annual migration is drastically cut, Britain will need 10 new cities the size of Birmingham to accommodate the extra population, its report found.’
In other words, the gutter-press have moved from veiled talk about Britain being ‘swamped’ by migrants to something dangerously close to racism. What else can be said about a position which refers to people who have lived in Britain their entire lives as ‘hidden migrants’?
Not only is this technically incorrect but it’s also deeply sinister – a person may have spent their entire life in Britain but, according to the Express, they would still be a ‘hidden migrant’ and part of a ‘foreign baby boom’.
As well as the nasty assumption that the children of migrants can never truly be British, Migration Watch also make a glaring statistical error: in coming up with their figures they oddly assume that those Britons who emigrated between 2001 and 2012 would not have had children had they stayed.
Indeed, they don’t even factor this in – they simply assume that the only children worth counting are the children of migrants.
And so, then, it seems that what’s important to the Express is not a baby boom as such, but a ‘foreign baby boom’. It’s not the population increase that matters, but the foreign population increase – the children of migrants still being foreign, apparently.
To be clear: this is dangerously close to open racism.
Update ————————————————————————–
Migration Watch has since criticised the Daily Express for using the term “hidden migrant” and described it as “not appropriate”.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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55 Responses to “Migration Watch and the Daily Express are dangerously close to open racism”
madasafish
So what should we do, go back to asia?
Errr it was Africa we originally came from.. And the wave of first migrants to the UK walked across the tundra which flooded to become the English Channel when the sea ice melted..
So send them back to Calais I think.
You can set an example and go first 🙂
madasafish
“ It’s not the population increase that matters, but the foreign population increase – the children of migrants still being foreign, apparently.”
Obviously the writer has never been to Bradford then..or parts of Birmingham either.. Where you need interpreters when the second generation immigrants speak to you. Where female circumcision is practised and arranged marriages.
Unless of course it’s British to mutilate babies and arrange marriages.. but as one is illegal, it’s very unlikely.
GhostofJimMorrison
so to use their analogy, we are all migrants. So what should we do, go back to asia?
Facetious analogy and you know it. No help whatsoever to the immigration debate, but likely to get you mega thumbs up on the Guardian’s CIF. Could you also explain exactly why Migration Watch is a racist organisation?
GhostofJimMorrison
Don’t expect any rational debate from Bloodworth when it comes to immigration. He’s made his bed and he’s damned if he’s getting out of it.
Chris Kitcher
This nasty xenophobic mania that is infecting the UK at the present time makes me ashamed to be British. Sadly the racists that are so fond of attacking the immigrants, who are currently doing most of the low paid jobs, will be the very people that are forced by Idiot Duncan-Smith to take on these jobs when the racists have prevented immigrants coming into the UK.