Should we trust a new study that claims that the level of irregular migration in the UK has essentially not changed in the past 16 years? That is the assertion being made in the reporting of a project called Measuring Irregular Migration, or MIrreM – a collaboration between Oxford University and 17 other universities across Europe and North America.
‘Irregular Migration to the UK and other large European countries is same as 2008, research shows,’ states a headline in the Guardian. This, needless to say, flies in the face of reports over the weekend that nearly 1,000 migrants arrived in small boats in a single day. Visibly, irregular migration appears to be out of control: so is the Guardian really right to state that nothing has really happened since 2008 – in other words, nothing to see here, please move along?
The first thing to note is that irregular migration is not synonymous with small boat arrivals – the latter is only a subset of the former, which also includes people arriving in lorries, turning up at ports and airports without documentation – as well as people who overstay visas. Moreover, the MIrreM study is attempting to count the number of irregular migrants living in Britain, not new arrivals. So it wouldn’t be impossible for small boat arrivals to be soaring at a time when the overall number of irregular migrants living in Britain is static.
But when you actually read the MIrreM report, you realise that, for the UK, it is actually comparing 2008 with 2017 – the latter of which is seven years ago and predates the phenomenon of mass arrivals in small boats. Moreover, there is a wide spread in its estimates. It puts the number of irregular migrants living in Britain in 2008 at between 417,000 and 863,000, and in 2017 between 594,000 and 745,000 – which is not all that informative. Nor does the MIrreM study include any original counting – all it is doing is taking existing estimates made by academics, think tanks, government and the like, and then scoring them according to its own quality criteria – which includes such things as asking whether the raw data has been made available. It is what you might call a desktop study – it isn’t sending anyone around to the nation’s restaurants, sweatshops, or shanty towns to count the number of foreign nationals living here without proper documentation.
What do the official statistics on irregular migration tell us? The Home Office publishes comparable figures for 2018 to 2024, which show that the number of detected small boat arrivals was 299 in 2018, and 29,437 in 2023. The number of people arriving at airports without the right papers was 4,769 in 2018, and 3,854 in 2023. The number arriving in ports was 1,052 in 2018, and 327 in 2023.
What the Home Office does do is publish statistics on the number of people who have overstayed their visa. When the think tank Migration Watch UK dug into the figures in 2021, it found that there is no record of 91,000 of those with visas that expired in 2019/20 either leaving the country or renewing their visas. This suggests that visa overstayers may be the largest group of irregular migrants by far – which wouldn’t be surprising as it is a lot easier and safer than coming to Britain on a rubber dinghy.
But the overall message is that we don’t have very good statistics on overall irregular migration – which is not all that surprising thanks to its clandestine nature. This is at least admitted in the MIrreM report, if not in the reporting of it. We do, on the other hand, have reasonably robust statistics on the number of people caught arriving on small boats – and that number has very definitely exploded.
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