Daily Mail Watch

How the Mail’s Home Affairs Editor fact checks press releases

Posted by 5cc

March 11th, 2009

Yesterday’s Mail includes a nice immigration scare story that’s pretty typical of the paper’s output. ‘UK migrant total is ‘three times the world average” is the headline.

Those of you new to this lark of looking at the way the Daily Mail reports immigration issues might be a bit unfamiliar with how these things work, so before we go on I’d like to as what you think the job of a newspaper’s Home Affairs Editor is be when they’re confronted with a press release from a lobby group. Would the editor:

a) use the release as a springboard to write a story, checking carefully into its claims before they reproduce them to make sure the article they write is accurate and contacting relevant people for extra quotes and information;
b) rewrite the press release in their own words;
c) rewrite the press release in their own words, while exaggerating one or two claims to make the story more sensational?

If you answered ‘a’ – welcome to MailWatch! Enjoy your stay! The correct answer for this article is, of course ‘c’.

The story is taken pretty much hook, line and sinker from the MigrationWatch press release ‘MIGRANT STOCK HAS DOUBLED SINCE 199I [sic] IMMIGRATION PROBLEM ‘HOME GROWN’ – NOT A RESULT OF GLOBALISATION‘. The ‘quotes’ from Sir Andrew Green have been CTRL+Ced from the release, and only one detail I can see has been taken from the report the release is promoting – ‘How did immigration get out of control?‘. Even that detail has been misreported.

The differences between the Mail article and the source material
There are only two things in the Mail story that aren’t in the press release or report. The first is the quote in the headline about the total being ‘three times the world average’. Those of you new to this game might imagine that the ‘three times the world average’ is in quotation marks because it is a quotation. It isn’t. The words don’t appear in either MigrationWatch’s press release or report. The quotes are an example of what Language Log has called ‘mendacity quotes‘.

The reason these words don’t appear in any of MigrationWatch’s articles could be because the figure the Mail is claiming is ‘the world average’ isn’t in fact the average number of migrants per 100 inhabitants of each country of the world, as the phrase would imply, but the total percentage of the world’s population who is classed as a migrant. Here’s why there might be a difference.

Imagine three countries that have had exactly the same number of births and deaths in a year so there has been no natural change in population. Country A has a population of 1,000. 500 of it’s inhabitants have migrated to two other countries, B and C, both of which have a population of 500. This is how the percentages of their populations taken up by migrants would be:

Country A – population 1,000: 0% migrants
Country B – population 500: 50% migrants
Country C – population 500: 50% migrants

25% of the people in these three countries are migrants. But the average number of migrant per 100 in the three countries is 33.3 – 50+50+0 divided by 3. That’s at least how mean worked when I did my GCSEs. The average number of migrants per 100 population of each country in the world is likely to be different from the 3% quoted in this article. Might be more, might be less – but the reason MigrationWatch doesn’t use the term ‘global average’ could be because it would create a misleading impression.

The second thing that doesn’t appear in MigrationWatch’s articles is the frequent reference the Mail story makes to things it blames on Labour, whereas MigrationWatch blames only the government. Sure, the current government is a Labour one, but one of the things MigrationWatch blames for the increase in immigration was started by the Conservatives, a detail that curiously doesn’t make the Mail version. Wonder why.

There is a third difference that sort of appears in the MigrationWatch report, but is misreported in the Mail. The Mail says, ‘Overall, net migration – or the number of people arriving compared to those leaving each year – has trebled from 107,000 to 317,000 in that time [until 'last year'].’ It hasn’t. Net migration in 2007, the last year measured, was 237,000. The MigrationWatch report does say ‘But in the decade from 1997 to 2006 net foreign immigration trebled from 107,000 to 317,000,’ but there’s a difference. MigrationWatch is referring purely to ‘foreign’ people – the overall total is lower because of the number of UK citizens leaving. The Mail’s version makes it look as though total net migration is much higher than it really is.

The reliability of MigrationWatch’s report and press release
The basic premise of MigrationWatch’s material is that since the total number of migrants in the world has only risen from 2.5% to 3% between 1960 and 2005 while the percentage of the UK’s population who are migrants has risen from 4.5% to 11% between 1961 and 2008, claims that the rise in the number of migrants in the UK is part of globalisaton are rubbish, we have a ridiculously high proportion of migrants in the UK and it’s all the government’s fault.

Unfortunately, MigrationWatch neglects to mention that the rise of 2.5% to 3% of the world’s population taken up by migrants actually represents a rise from 75 million to 191 million migrants in the world, since the world’s population has pretty much doubled in the same time. That’s a rise of over 120 milion migrants in the world. Sure looks like a world trend.

The number of countries in the world that these people can have moved to hasn’t doubled. The population hasn’t doubled uniformly in every country in the world either. Therefore, some countries will inevitably have increased in the percentage of their populations taken up by migrants – especially if the natural change in their population has been low and emigration by their own citizens has been high. To test whether the UK’s proportion of migrants is unusually high – and therefore not part of a global phenomenon – wouldn’t you compare the UK percentage to the percentage of other, similar countries?

That’s where you’d expect MigrationWatch’s study to start, but it doesn’t. Instead it discounts comparison with every similar country – either Western European or English speaking industrialised nation – for some reason or other. That all countries that we might want to compare the UK to are summarily dismissed as not being comparable looks very much like special pleading to me. If the UK can’t be compared to Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, the US and so on and so on, why can it be compared with everyone else added together, including these countries?

The MigrationWatch report is based in large part on ‘Trends in Total Migrant Stock: The 2005 Revision‘, from the UN. Handily, the UN report includes a nice table of the 20 countries in the world with the highest total number of migrants in their population. I’ve taken that table and made a quick calculation for each country on the table to show the percentage of the population those migrants represent and knocked it out in order. Their populations are taken from 2005 UN estimates from each country. Here goes:

1. United Arab Emirates – 71%
2. Hong Kong – 42.6%
3. Israel – 40.1%
4. Jordan – 38.6%
5. Saudi Arabia – 26%
6. Australia – 20%
7. Canada – 19%
8. Kazakhstan – 16.8%
9. Ukraine – 14.6%
10. Cote D’Ivoire – 13.2%
11. US – 12.8%
12. Germany – 12.2%
13. Spain – 11.1%
14. France – 10.7%
15. Russia – 8.4%
16. Italy – 4.3%
17. Pakistan – 2.1%
18. Japan – 1.6%
19. India – 0.5%

I’ve missed out the UK for now, but based on the population of 2005 we would fit in at 15th on this table, just behind France. You might be able to guess what’s coming next.

Even if the percentage of migrants in every country in this table has not risen at all in the last three years, the UK would be joint 14th with France. Fractions of fractions of percentage points might take us higher. But, of course, the proportion of migrants will have risen in France and other countries over the last three years.

For a country whose proportion of migrants has risen quickly since 1990, look at Spain. In 1990, the country didn’t have enough migrants to make the UN’s top 20 list at all, with fewer than 1.4 million migrants. By 2005, Spain was 10th on the table with 4.8 million – one place behind the UK. But we’re not allowed to compare the UK to Spain so the rise in the UK’s migrant population is shocking and it’s all the government’s fault. No global trend here.

Curiously, MigrationWatch claims, ‘The government also suggests that the foreign born percentage in Britain is not far out or line with such countries as Canada, Australia and the US,’ but offers no reference for this. It might be difficult to find one, since Australia and Canada both had more than double the percentage of migrants than the UK in 2005, which is pretty far out of line.

If MigrationWatch wanted to look further afield for any indication of whether the U’s migration figures are part of a global phenomenon or all the lying government’s fault, it could have looked as far as this report from Eurostat, ‘Recent migration trends: citizens of EU-27 Member States become ever more mobile while EU remains attractive to non-EU citizens‘. It includes this, about the rate of immigration compared to total populations of European countries:

The largest numbers of immigrants to the EU in 2006 were recorded in Spain, Germany and United Kingdom.

[...]

However, among these countries only Spain also had high immigration relative to its population size. The highest rate of immigration was recorded in Luxembourg, followed by Ireland, Cyprus and Spain. These four countries had significantly higher rates compared with other Member States, while for Germany and the United Kingdom, immigration per 1000 inhabitants was close to the EU-27 average.

The immigration rate for the UK is around the EU average. Looks like a global – or at least European – phenomenon to me.

In short, the MigrationWatch report isn’t very reliable. It disqualifies comparison of the UK with other countries, but allows comparison with the total percentage of migrants in the world without looking at any difference there. No doubt, any other countries with a higher percentage of migrants would be dismissed from comparison for some reason or another too. It doesn’t look at all at illegal immigration, or ask whether that would have risen more sharply if the government’s policies were different. Bizarrely, it claims that the rise in the number of migrants in the UK can’t be a result of globalisation partly because of ‘the deliberate promotion of economic migration’. Last time I checked, a more free movement of labour (or greater economic migration) was a part of globalisation. Migrationwatch even disqualifies comparison with Australia and Canada partly because ‘They have for many years developed policies to attract immigrants’. But it accuses the UK of deliberately attracting migrants too – so how is this different?

The whole thing
You’d expect the Home Affairs Editor of a national newspaper to ask some questions about this press release. You’d expect them to check the details they do reference to make sure their coverage were accurate. You’d expect them to do more than cut and paste quotes from a press release and build an article around them. You’d definitely not expect them to invent a quote for the headline. But only if you weren’t familiar with the way the Mail operates.

Categories: Immigration | Tags: Immigration