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”
GhostofJimMorrison
According to a UN report Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision, the UK has a more immigrants than Australia (7,824,131 to 6,468,640 respectively)
GhostofJimMorrison
I’m not falling for anything, pal. I have a brain, I can think for myself thank you very much. I’m actively involved in politics and I know what I believe in. Spare me your cod-Chomsky false-concious guff. This is why more and more people are flocking to UKIP: they are sick of being told they are fools and bigots, idiots who are ‘falling for UKIP propaganda’. But of course, you know better and can see through it all.
Chris Kitcher
What a twat you are. If you vote for UKIP you are one of the mindless morons that will destroy this country. We have moved on from the 1950’s although UKIP want to return to the old order where the poor are condemned to poverty whilst the rich succeed. Get real thicko and think for once.
Guest
So you expect the truth, lashing out it as guff and whining about your scrabble scores. Keep using your PC bigotry there against the left, as you admit you want 1960’s style incomes and lifespans.
£798 per year for a clerical officer. £14 2s 1d per week for a manual labourer.
Ten years shorter lifespans, on average.
(From Hansard)
That’s what you want for the British, right.
Guest
Ah yes, backwards as decent wages are appeased! How dare they!