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”
Trofim
You mean if there was no immigration, then unemployed people would have to work and get dirt on their hands? Don’t worry – there’s little chance of that.
GhostofJimMorrison
Hysterical and predictable codswallop! Name me one nation of comparable size that would tolerate the levels of immigration currently facing the UK. It’s a simple question of numbers and had sod all to do with skin colour! Not for me and most sensible people at any rate.
madasafish
The flooding of the English Channel happened at the end of the last Ice Age.. when the land was low lying, grassy – just like tundra. I am not referring to today but whenever it happened about 200,000 years ago..
CGR
“hidden migrant” is an excellent term and means just what it says.
Mike Stallard
The mistake a lot of people make is to lump all “immigrants” together. There is a world of difference between a Lithuanian and a Pole. They do not usually get on. There is a thousand mile gap between a Somali and a Sierra Leonean. They may both have black skin, but they are certainly as different as Russians and Sikhs. Chinese and Japanese are terribly different! all these people live over here now and they bring their own prejudices, their own languages, their own political ideas (Tower Hamlets, Rochdale) with them too.
And then there is religion. The Muslims are wiping out the christians in the Levant. The Christians are wiping out the Muslims in Central Africa. All that is now over here too. There is a mosque in most cities and shari’a law is replacing common law.
But we are expected to move out and live in our own little ghettos and not talk about it. Very British!