When do the descendants of immigrants go from being migrants to being natives? That’s the question raised by a MigrationWatch UK study which says that the impact of immigration on the 4.6 million increase in the UK’s population since the millennium has been ‘substantially underestimated’. Why? Because the government’s statistics agency doesn’t attribute the 1.3 million children born to foreign-born parents to migration.
Sir Andrew Green, the chair of MigrationWatch, said that:
‘It is now undeniable that the massive scale of net migration has been the main cause of our population growth and that, in the future, our population growth is likely to be almost entirely due to migration.’
The Office for National Statistics says that migration has been responsible for 57 per cent of the increase in population, on average, since 2001; MigrationWatch that it has been responsible for 84 per cent – and that ‘in the longer term all population growth is likely to be due to immigration’.
Cue a tweet from Nigel Farage:
84 per cent of population growth between 2001 and 2012 – or 3.8 million – was due to migration: http://t.co/qPwn7erstg
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) November 26, 2014
And another:
Sir Andrew Green notes: even if net migration brought down to 165,000 a year, we’d have to build 10 cities of Birmingham size within 25 yrs.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) November 26, 2014
Frightful! But two of Farage’s children – those born to his German wife, Kirsten, would be included in MigrationWatch’s total, which prompted the inevitable Twitter backlash. A Ukip spokesperson told the Independent that there are ‘ramifications for public services’ if migrants are ‘hidden’ in statistics and that ‘if the figures for migration don’t include children, you’re not taking the correct facts into account for public policy’. Perhaps not. But the problem isn’t the numbers, it’s the presentation of some British children as ‘hidden migrants’, which makes it sound as though the children of migrants can never truly be British.
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