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How Right-Wing Media Spread the False Claim That One in Twelve Londoners Are ‘Illegal Migrants’

There is a deliberate attempt to mislead the public, in order to push for Trump-style mass deportations, argues Zoe Gardner

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage shares the false claim by the Daily Telegraph. Image: Facebook

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The right-wing press got itself in hot water this week over a deeply misleading statistic that claimed one in twelve Londoners is an undocumented migrant. It was originally published in the Telegraph, but was uncritically re-printed and repeated across the entire media ecosystem from the Times, to the Mail to GBNews.

The claim, as many Londoners could immediately tell, is completely false. The study in question, commissioned by Thames Water, included immigrants with Indefinite Leave to Remain and tourists among the supposed irregular migrant population. Furthermore, it put that inflated figure into a deflated figure for the population of London of around seven million, instead of the nearly nine million it actually is. The resulting findings obviously have no credibility at all.

But the wild claim did what it was supposed to. You can see the purpose of it in the Telegraph’s very own sub-heading: ‘New research adds to fears over borders and increased pressure on public services’. You bet it does: exactly as it was intended to. As the IPSO complaints, corrections and withdrawals roll in, we know the number of people even clocking the corrections at all must be a tiny fraction of those reached by the original headlines.

Baseless scaremongering about undocumented migrants is a tactic copied directly from the Trump playbook by the British anti-migrant right. They are keen to promote a “mass deportations” agenda just like his. But deportations are no answer to the real problem of undocumented migrants in this country, and as usual the alternative, workable and humane solutions are not getting anything like the same airtime.

Our immigration system is a shambles. It systematically produces people unable to maintain a legal immigration status. Deportations are expensive, brutal and only pursue the victims churned out of a broken system – they are part of an authoritarian spectacle that does nothing but harm our communities.

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How People Become Undocumented

The first thing to know about undocumented migrants is they did not come to the country on small boats. The people who come on boats pretty much universally present themselves to the authorities on arrival and apply for asylum. Asylum seekers are not undocumented, undocumented migrants are hidden from the state and live in the UK without authorisation. They overwhelmingly come to the UK with a visa to work, study, or visit, and end up staying beyond its terms. Over time, there will always be people in these circumstances, because our immigration system is designed to produce this problem.

Immigration visas of all kinds have become much more restrictive over recent years. They are time-limited, complex and expensive, and often tie you to your employer without the possibility to move easily into another job. That is stifling and stressful for highly paid migrants, but for those in low-paid areas of work it is a disaster. The care workers’ visa and seasonal farm workers’ visa are particularly bad examples of restrictive, employer-tied systems that have created massive and widespread problems of exploitation and abuse of workers.

The nature of these short-term visas is that on a regular repeated basis immigrants have to reapply to renew their stay. This is a complex and extremely expensive process that migrants are forced to undergo over and over again, just for the right to stay in their homes and their jobs. Inevitably, some people find they cannot afford to, or cannot complete the reapplication criteria. Those people end up undocumented and remaining in the UK without leave.

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Who Are They?

Around half of the undocumented population are women. There are lots of ways the immigration system presents particular challenges for women – they often are lower earners, who may therefore struggle to pay visa renewal fees, or they may be here on a spouse visa and need to escape an abusive partner, so they no longer fulfil their visa terms. Women can end up trapped in dangerous situations unable to obtain support because of their undocumented immigration status.

Children also make up a significant proportion of the undocumented population, and many of those children will even have been born in the UK. Since the 1980s a child born in the UK who has never known any other home is still not automatically considered a British citizen, and has no right to be here if their parents don’t have a stable immigration status.

Even if we feasibly could deport every last one of these people (and it would be extraordinarily brutal and expensive to try) then the same problematic visa system would simply churn out more people without status to replace them. The problem is our immigration system is built on precarious, temporary and expensive visas that a minority of users are guaranteed to fall foul of. Once you lose your status, we have no reasonable ways for you to regain it, leaving people trapped in a long-term limbo, hyper vulnerable to trafficking, exploitation and crime.

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What are the Solutions?

The real way to address undocumented migration is to overhaul the visa system to one focused on stable, long-term status for the people who come to work and live here. Automatic and affordable visa renewals and faster pathways to long-term residence would protect most people from becoming trapped outside the system, while improving integration, helping newcomers become full parts of our communities without the rug constantly being pulled from under their feet as another visa renewal deadline looms over them.

For those who have fallen out of the system, reasonable and affordable pathways to regularisation should be made available, especially to the many among them who are long-term UK residents with family members living here. Children who have never lived anywhere but the UK should obviously be entitled to citizenship.

The Right don’t want us to reform the broken immigration system that produces undocumented migrants. They want to a bogeyman to point at overblown figures and create a panic to bolster a punitive deportations agenda that won’t solve the problem. The people who get rich out of deportations – the private companies that run our detention centres and carry out the charter flights – will be the only ones benefiting from the adoption of a Trumpist deportations agenda targeting men, women and children in the UK.


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