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Whenever you see an article, and in particular, a headline from James Slack (the clue lies in the name) it is always best to take it with not so much a pinch of salt, but a bucket. Take his article today for example: UK migrant total is ‘three times the world average’; you can already envisage tea being spat into the laps of middle-Englanders all across the country. 
However, we need look no further than the second paragraph of the article to realise that the headline is at best, deliberately misleading, at worst an outright lie: Eleven per cent of British residents were born abroad, against the global figure of 3 per cent. There is a word missing here that he includes in the headline: ‘average’. In the headline the ‘eleven per cent’ is presumably the figure that is ‘three times’ the ‘world average’ of 3 per cent. However, in the second paragraph we are being told that the 3 per cent is merely a ‘global figure’, not a global average – why is this? Reading on, James reveals why he excludes the word ‘average’ from the second paragraph: if he included it he would be lying.
He clearly acknowledges in paragraph 6 (above) that ‘the percentage of the world population who are international migrants rose from 2.5% in 1960 to 3% in 2005’. Therefore he acknowledges that the 3% figure is not an average at all; it is the global percentage of international migrants compared to those not classed as international migrants. It is not a global average representing how many international migrants reside in any given country; the headline is therefore a complete lie. However, James is stating that the 3% figure is a global average of how many foreign born people live in any given nation in his headline, although this is clearly not what he is stating in the article. However, this seems to be the interpretation that he wishes his readers to walk away with as he contradicts the above statement with: ‘In Britain, it went from 4.5 per cent in 1961 to 9.3 per cent in 2005’. Notice how James uses the pronoun ‘it’ here, to imply that the figures he is introducing here are the same as the 3% figure produced in the preceding sentence. By doing this, James is lying – pure and simple. Clearly the figures bear no relevance to one another, one figure is the total number of people in the world classed as ‘international migrants’, the second figure is a percentage of international migrants living in the UK. James wants his readers to see the 9.3% figure as being three times higher than the equivalent 3% figure, but of course the figures are not at all equivalent. The lie here is intended to cause further racial tension, it therefore chooses to ignore published statistics that show that immigration in the UK is not actually that high compared to other EU countries, and much less that countries like Canada, America and Australia. A Google search for information reveals a report by the UK Statistics Authority [pdf] that puts foreign born nationals living in the UK as of 2001 at 8.3%, rising from 4.2% in 1951. They point out that although this is slightly above the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development [OECD] average of 7.8%, it is ‘substantially below that of major immigration countries’ such as the USA (12.3%), Canada (19.3%) and Australia (23%). It seems to make sense to compare the foreign-born percentage of the UK with OECD countries as they share core attributes and economic similarities. UN figures for International migrants as percentage of population shows that in 2005 the UK figure was 9.1%. The same figures show that Switzerland (that well-know hotbed of racial tension) has a international migrant population of 22.9%. Sweden may provide male fantasies of a country teeming with blonde beauties, but sorry boys, it has an international migrant percentage of 12.4%. Some other figures for your perusal: Spain 11.1% (how many Mail-reading ex-pats I wonder…), Netherlands 10.1%, Ireland 14.1%, Germany 12.3%, France 10.7%. Luxembourg is far more popular than the UK with a whopping 37.4%, even Estonia is more desirable than the UK with 15.2%. To quote another Mail writer who is employed to stir up racial tension: you couldn’t make it up – but James does, every time he writes.
Some random other notes... As usual, James is reluctant to reference his statistics directly, merely announcing that they ‘emerged last night’ - he does not feel the need to inform us who released the figures, and whether he has had enough time to verify or interpret them correctly (as an aside information that the Mail refers to always seems to ‘emerge’ as if the figures exist separately to any organisation; that somehow the figures exist organically, and are therefore, natural, real and self-evident). The article obviously includes quotations from Sir Andrew Green from Migrationwatch UK, as someone sarcastically points out in the comments underneath the article: ‘that bastion of unbiased views on the subject of immigration’. |
