Carl D
Gold Member
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Australian Politics
Posts: 9597
Rivervale, Perth
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(continued)
Even taking these figures at face value, the UK is adding another million people to its population about every three years. The vast majority of these visitors for life are non-European. Depending on your politics, that may or may not seem disquieting. But given that EU migration has been so underestimated that the numbers might as well have been made up, what is Britain’s real annual level of migration from the rest of the world? Even the stats we’re provided on the number of boat people fleeing the terrible tyranny of France for the glorious liberty of lockdown Britain are only the seafarers whom the Border Force has apprehended. No one counts the folks who land their dinghies, swipe a towel from a washing line and slip off into the countryside unnoticed. When the people-smugglers aren’t caught, no one counts the customers who are stuffed into lorries in Belgium, dissolve into family networks and pick up work under the table. Only the intrepid Migration Watch seems to be keeping track of the 90,000 people who annually overstay their UK visas, on top of the 250,000 ‘non-visa nationals’, from countries whose citizens aren’t required to have a visa, who fail to leave the country within the mandatory six months.
My purpose here is not to stir up xenophobic hysteria. After all, I’m a UK immigrant myself. Still, I have had it with the fake precision of numbers like that ‘313,000’ annual migration total. If the EU settlement scheme’s big reveal is any guide, the real number is at least twice that, meaning the population is actually rising by a million every 19 months. These fantasy figures matter for policies on transport, housing, water, energy, sewage and the NHS. In truth, no one knows how many people are living in the United Kingdom. Too many guests of the nation have a keen self-interest in not being counted.
This is purely anecdotal, but in my formerly white, working-class neighbourhood of south London, the proportion of Africans on the streets is high. In the 11 years we’ve lived there, that proportion has palpably risen. One inevitably puzzles over the aegis under which all these people from a different continent took up residence. One inevitably puzzles over whether the government has any idea how many newcomers we don’t recognise have been filtering through the revolving door of the council house next door. Staggeringly, even official figures estimate that closing on 40 per cent of the inhabitants of the nation’s capital were born in another country.
Mind, on the ‘lies, damned lies and immigration statistics’ front, the United States takes the biscuit. The improbably low stats routinely quoted in America are either naive or wilfully deceitful. But my homeland’s utter cluelessness about how many people have poured into the country illegally is so dumbfounding that we’ll reserve my astonishment for a Part II.
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