The Media Distortion Warping Britain’s Views on Immigration

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A few weeks ago, the authors of a study from the British Runnymede Trust wrote that in political debate and media coverage in the UK on the topic of immigration, the pattern was one marked by “hostile language” and that, “the defining characteristic of migrants has been cemented as illegality over the past decade.”

Just a week later, a YouGov poll asking UK residents about immigration revealed what can only be described as catastrophic levels of ignorance.

When asked if there are more immigrants staying in the UK legally or illegally, 33% of all YouGov poll respondents said there were “much more” in the UK illegally, while 15% said there were “somewhat more.” 14% said the opposite: that there were “much more staying legally than illegally.”

For respondents who said they want large numbers of immigrants to leave the UK, the levels of ignorance were even more dramatic, with 55% who said there were “much more” in the UK illegally and 17% answering “somewhat more.” Just 4% of those who want to deport immigrants answered that there were “much more staying legally than illegally.”

The actual numbers?

According to the 2022 UK census, there were 10.7 million legal immigrants in the UK, while Oxford University’s Mirrem Project on migration put the number of illegal immigrants at 750,000. In other words, there are roughly 14 times as many legal immigrants in the UK as there are illegal. In other words, “much more staying legally.”

This should ring alarms bell about political rhetoric, media focus and media silence.

These numbers are all the more disturbing because they come after a Brexit referendum that revolved almost entirely around immigration. For years running up to the vote, and for almost a decade after the vote, UK media broadcast thousands of hours and published thousands of articles about immigration.

It has been nothing short of an obsession, particularly on the part of right-wing media such as the Daily Mail, Daily Express and GB News. And, yet, despite the avalanche of coverage, half of the country are completely wrong in their assumptions about immigration to the UK.

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One explanation could be that the UK media that pushed for Brexit have absolutely no interest in facts or context on immigration that contradicted their line. For over 20 years, that same press has written countless emotional pieces about “swarms” and “floods” of “illegal migrants” coming to the UK. It’s no coincidence that the target audience for these media – those in the UK who favour deporting immigrants – were 50% more likely to be completely misinformed about immigration than a general population that is itself misinformed.

But the deep lack of knowledge about immigration also suggests a broader failure of journalism beyond just outlets favouring the political right. It is also a failure of mainstream journalism that often amplifies immigrant stereotypes or fails to provide proper context.

Consider another poll conducted by Ipsos in 2016 (the year UK voters opted for Brexit), where respondents were asked to estimate the current Muslim population, and to then estimate what that percentage would be four years later in 2020.

In 2016, UK respondents estimated that Muslims made up 15% of the UK population, which would equal 9.9 million residents. The actual number was 5%, or 3.3 million. The same respondents then estimated that by 2020 Muslims would make up 21% of the UK population, or 14.1 million people. The actual percentage by 2020 was 6.5%, or 4.4 million.

Think about those numbers for a second.

In 2016, UK residents thought that the Muslim population was three times the actual number, and that by 2020 1 in 5 people in the UK would be Muslim. They also thought that by 2020 there would be at least 10 million more Muslims than there actually were. For these incorrect numbers to be possible, the Muslim population of the UK would have to have increased by an utterly implausible one million per year. Yet, that is precisely what many in the UK believed.

In one final YouGov study from few weeks ago, 41% of all UK residents said that Muslim immigrants have a “negative impact” on the country. While 29% of Labour and 52% of Conservative agreed with that claim, these figures were dwarfed by Reform Party supporters, 87% of whom said Muslim immigrants were bad for the country.

Reform, we should remember, are currently leading in the UK polls.

There is a great deal of discussion about the impact of mediated disinformation on democracy. But, it is important to remember that lack of context and media silence can be just as damaging, and serve similar functions, as disinformation.

If the vast majority of media coverage and political debate on immigration focuses on “illegal” immigrants, is it any wonder that people assume illegal immigration to be dominant?

If that same debate and media coverage disproportionately focuses on one religious or ethnic group, is it any wonder that people assume that group to be hugely over-represented?

Finally, if the group in question is assumed to be in the country, and arriving in the country, in numbers wildly out of proportion with reality, is it any wonder that those who want to restrict immigration will see them as a net negative?

UK media coverage of immigration has been marked by high levels of emotive scapegoating and stereotyping. It has also been marked by an absence of nuance and context, and the poll numbers are, at least in part, the result of UK media refusing to provide that nuance and context. The numbers also raise the fundamental issue of how rational debate about immigration and integration can even take place with such enormous levels of ignorance about basic facts.

Journalism doesn’t have to print falsehoods in order to mislead. The issues that journalists and editors choose to emphasise, and the things they do not say or the context they do not provide, can be just as damaging.

This article first appeared in Swedish in the publication Dagens ETC