Sometimes I think I’m becoming immune to these things. When I first read through the Mail’s article on the migration figures released by the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics (both pdfs) I didn’t see too much wrong.
Yeah, the panic over babies born to ‘foreign’ (read: ‘born outside the UK’) mothers leaves a nasty taste, and the use of population density statistics is misleading (and reminiscent of MigrationWatch), but generally it’s accurate enough. Though it does get it even more wrong in the bullet points – pretty sure more people live in Germany and France than the UK.
But for some reason I’d managed to completely ignore the headline (thanks to 5 Chinese Crackers for spotting).
The number of immigrants living in the UK long-term has not increased by 20%. Net immigration is up by about 20%, but that’s different. Veeeery different. That’s the increase in the year-on-year overall effect of migration on population figures, and even that isn’t driven by more people coming to the country (it’s slightly down) but by a bigger drop in people leaving.
Just for fun, using this data, here’s the number of non-UK nationals in the country for the past few years (in 1000s):
- 2009: 6910
- 2008: 6693
- 2007: 6342
- 2006: 5997
- 2005: 5552
- 2004: 5223
The increase from 2008 to 2009 is 217,000, or 3.2%. Not 20%. Not even nearly 20%.
Still, it’s an easy mistake to make. In a headline on the most-visited national newspaper website in the UK.
You’d think the Mail would be happy fewer people are leaving good old Britain, but I guess that hurts their thriving market of ex-pats in gated Mediterranean communities.
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