Immigration: Why Let The Truth Spoil A Good Story?

The Telegraph: Immigration up by a fifth. WRONG.
The Sun: Net immigration up 20% in year. WRONG.
Daily Mail: Number of immigrants living in the UK long-term soars by 20% in 1 year. WRONG.
London Evening Standard: Rise in immigration adds 200,000 to British population. WRONG.
Press Association (UK): Students lead 20% immigration rise. WRONG.

The Guardian: Figures show 20% increase in net migration to UK. CORRECT.
BBC News: Net migration to UK rose in 2009, statistics show. CORRECT.
The Associated Press (Canada): Number of immigrants to UK falls 4 per cent last year, statistics agency says. CORRECT.

Yet again the right-whinge press have manipulated the latest migration figures from the Office for National Statistics. Either that or their reporters still cannot get their head around a really simple concept that we have explained on a number of occasions before: IN MIGRATION (immigration + live births) - OUT MIGRATION (emigration + deaths) = NET MIGRATION.

So, for the idiots at the Telegraph, Mail and Sun to claim that IMMIGRATION has RISEN when it has in fact FALLEN by 4%, down from 590,000 in 2008 to 567,000 last year, is either an outright lie or a perfect illustration of the fact that they just do not know what they are talking about.

In the case of the Daily Flail it looks very much like the former, as they chose to feature their latest on-line version of the story [we don't buy the paper, so we don't actually know what the hard copy version looks like] chooses to focus on the fact that "The number of babies born to immigrant mothers has doubled in a decade" to one in four, "polluting our precious bodily fluids". [The last bit isn't in the Flail, but you get what we mean.] This of course is to be expected, as the ONS put it: "If the number of non UK-born women living in England and Wales increases then it follows that the number of births to these women is likely to increase." But that didn't put the Flail off from making a big thing out of it. Methinks, they do complain too much!

Here a nice helpful graph to illustrate exactly why immigration (the blue line) hasn't increased by 20% in the last year. And it is exactly the same one as in the Flail if you were wondering.