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
55 Responses to “Migration Watch and the Daily Express are dangerously close to open racism”
David Lindsay
How right the Daily Express is about the “hidden migrants” born in Britain to one or more foreign parents.
All four children of the so-called Duke of Edinburgh must be deported at once to Schleswig-Holstein, Sonderburg or Glücksburg, where they belong.
Trofim
As expected, the usual lefty guff, obligatory “racism” imprecation.
The usual lefty tactic of straw-man, putting words into the mouths of those who disagree with their dogmas. It’s what one expects of the left.
Trofim
Ever driven down the coast road, Route 101, of Oregon, Mr Bloodworth? On one side the
Pacific breakers, long empty beaches, and on the other side the redwood forests.
Sublime. Oregon, just a middle-sized American state is slightly larger than the
UK, and has less than 4 million inhabitants. Down on the south east coast of
the USA is Louisiana, slightly larger than England, with 5.5 million people –
quite crowded by USA standards. The UK has 64 million, England 56 million
people. When I was born in 1947, the UK was crowded by international standards even then, with 49 million people, and now has 15 million more. Space is part of the good life,
and a constant increase in population diminishes not only human wellbeing, but
the living environment on which we depend for our existence. It’s no accident
that 75% of Scandinavians, even the most crowded Scandinavian country –
Denmark, which has a population density less than a third of England’s – have a
second home, as big as or bigger than an average English house, often, in the
forest, by a lake. And it’s not coincidental that numerous species of flora and
fauna which were as common as dirt when I was young after the war, and now
rarities or on the verge of extinction, due to our huge population depriving
them of and despoiling their habitats. But when did a socialist have any
interest whatsoever in the environment? Socialists are happy to live in a box.
The sole point of human life to them, and to their right-wing counterparts – the
economic growth addicts, is production and consumption of things. Aesthetics,
landscapes, wilderness, space, beauty are as nothing to them.
The last thing this island needs is more human beings. Ideally it would have
half the population it has now. It’s a grotesque anachronism that the
government actually gives people money for having children and those who
produce more than 2 children should certainly not be given any kind of reward –
quite the reverse. We need a Ministry of Population. Lastly, may I post a link from an organization, a prominent patron of which is that well known fascist and racist, David Attenborough:
https://www.populationmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/population_problem_uk.pdf
GhostofJimMorrison
Wolfey that genuinely made me chuckle! I can think of plenty if people I’d love to throw off the White Cliffs. And guess what…you actually wouldn’t be one of them. In a weird way I think I’d miss having you here.
Trofim
Tundra? The nearest tundra to the UK is about 4000 miles away, and it certainly didn’t flood to become the English Channel.