Posted by sim-o
July 24th, 2009
The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.
Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.
According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…
A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn
A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.
Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…
NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.
So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?
The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.
Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…
There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.
So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.
There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).
But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.
Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.
As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?
And where did this original one million figure come from?
According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.
Notes:
- I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
- I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
- I hope my maths has not let me down
originaly posted at sim-o.me.uk
Categories: Immigration |
19 Comments
Posted by 5cc
May 8th, 2009
Nick Davies, in the excellent Flat Earth News, spoke about the concept of churnalism. Churnalism is the prectice whereby newspapers mindlessly churn out reproduced press releases, newswire copy, marketing guff and stories reported elsewhere without checking to see if they’re true.
A couple of weeks ago, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre gave evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee (here’s a video of the session). During the session, he was asked about the practice of churnalism and after a bit of waffle, Dacre answered that churnalism does go on in other papers, but, ‘I would refute that charge to the Daily Mail.’
He was also asked about the practice of kicking off stories with misleading headlines that are contradicted in the story’s text. He answered, ‘I’d like to think this doesn’t happen in the Mail – I’m not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn’t. It does happen in some areas of the media.’
This would be news to those who remember my post ‘How the Mail’s Home Affairs Editor fact checks press releases‘ from a couple of months ago, where the Mail had reproduced a press release from MigrationWatch and played about with it a bit to make it look more threatening. There’s a better example from earlier this week.
This Monday’s front page headline in the Daily Express was ‘EACH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO COST US £1MILLION‘. The story had been churned from a MigrationWatch press release, which didn’t actually say that each illegal immigrant was to cost us a million pounds, but said that if there were an anmesty for illegal immigrants, then each family of four granted an amnesty would cost a million pounds if they all arrived at 25, worked for no more than minimum wage their whole lives, while claiming the maximum in tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit the whole time. The housing benefit alone counts for about half the million.
MigrationWatch’s own headline is ‘Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants Could Cost Taxpayers ‘Up to £1m’ Per Family‘, so you can see how it’s been twisted. That’s some nice churning and misleading headline chicanery from the Express, but this is MailWatch. What about the Mail?
Monday’s Mail reported the same story, and the current headline on the website is ‘Each illegal immigrant costs us £1m, says study as Government faces calls for amnesty‘. Where the Express headline took MigrationWatch’s claim, removed the uncertainty and lied about the cost applying to each individual rather than each family of four, the Mail’s goes even further. Looking at the Daily Mail’s headline gives the impression that every illegal immigrant currently in the country costs a million pounds each right now.
Usually, when an article has a misleading headline, the story beneath has a bit of clarification buried somewhere toward the bottom. This one never clarifies that the cost is a potential for a family of four and not for each individual, although it hints at it with:
In London, where some 70 per cent of illegal immigrants are believed to live, the costs are even greater. As rents are considerably higher in the capital the total lifetime costs for a two child family resident in London is £1.1million, of which £505,000 is Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit.
So, Paul Dacre ‘refutes’ that churnalism goes on in the Mail, and would like to think the paper doesn’t lead with misleading headlines, and here’s proof that his ‘refutation’ is nonsense and the paper tells lies in headlines. This story has been churned and exaggerated either from the Express’s coverage, or directly from the MigrationWatch press release. ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ does appear to have at least seen the press release, since every quote attributed to Sir Andrew Green is lifted word for word from it.
Dacre also defended the Mail’s anti-MMR stories, coverage of the Max Mosely affair, and publishing the name of the village that Josef Fritzl’s daughter was relocated to by saying that all these things had been reported elsewhere in the media first – a practice he’s ‘refuted’ even occurs in the Mail.
Categories: Immigration |
Tags: editors, Immigration | 9 Comments
Posted by 5cc
March 14th, 2009
Since the Mail produces a lot of stories about immigration, it’s another post from me. I’d like to have a look at Thursday’s ‘UK to have Europe’s biggest population: Migration will force us ahead of Germany, says UN‘, because it includes another couple of typical techniques that are a familiar fixture of Mail articles on immigration. I will be looking at yesterdays’ Sangatte story later, but there’s so much anti-immigration stuff that gets umped out by the paper that it’s impossible to keep up.
The headline isn’t strictly true. The UN doesn’t say those things in quite such a definite way. Instead, the UN has updated their population growth predictions, based on data available in 2008. It offers projections based on what will happen depending on whether fertility rates are high, meduim, low or the same as 2005-2010. The UK will be the most populated in Europe in 2050 if our fertility rates are higher or the same as France and Germany.
If the UK’s fertility is lower, it won’t be higher than either and France will have overtaken the UK. Still, I’m being a little pedantic here. It’s not completely unreasonable to say comparing the three countries assuming the same rate of fertility will show the UK being higher than the other two. The UN press release is here, ‘WORLD POPULATION TO EXCEED 9 BILLION BY 2050‘ and the data can be found here ‘World Polulation Prospects: The 2008 Revision – Population database‘. All the figures not from the Mail that I quote here can be reproduced with the data in the second link.
The typical technique I want to talk about is where the article tells us:
The analysis comes at a time when England has already become the most crowded country in Europe, passing Holland as the nation with the most people squeezed into every square mile.
There’s even a nice big table that includes some figures, telling us that the source is the Office of National Statistics. Official looking, eh?
The first thing is that the article has quickly shifted from talking about the UK to talking about England in one quick step. If we were talking about England in the first part of the article, the paper wouldn’t be able to scare us with figures higher than Germany’s by 2050, even if the entire increase in the UK’s population happens in England.*
England accounts for 83% of the UK’s population. That’s most of the UK’s people in one part, so England is bound to have a greater density. When the Mail used England’s population density to frighten us back in January 2008 (the paper does this now and again – get used to it), I used the UN’s database to show that the UK is the fourth most densely populated country in Europe, behind Malta, Belgium and the Netherlands, and had been since 1950 (In ‘Let’s start 2008 with a good immigration scare story!‘). I’ve done a very quick check of all the countries in this table, and the UK will still be fourth by 2050. Not so scary now, eh?
The main problem with the population density figures the paper is frightening us with here, though, is that England is not the most densely populated country in Europe. We can see on the nice table that Malta has been disqualified for being a ’special case’. Those readers who read my last post will probably be familiar with countries being disqualified from comparison if they contradict what the Mail or MigrationWatch want us to think.
Even beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that England is the most densely populated country in Europe right now if we disqualify Malta. The article does say that the source for these figures is the ONS. What it doesn’t say is that only England’s figure is from 2008. Every other country’s figure is taken from the UN estimates of three years earlier, so England is only at the top if the Netherlands’ population density didn’t rise by more than one in three years. Since the UN predicts a rise of 8 between 2005 and 2010, that isn’t likely at all. The paper can get away with this because when the ONS supplied these figures in a Parliamentary Answer last September, they made clear that the European figures were from the UN – so the ONS is the source, but they’re actually not.
One last thing about the main figures this article is about. The paper is leaving at least one important detail out of its coverage here. The UK only ‘overtakes’ Germany’s population because the latter is predicted to be in steady decline, dropping from 82,409,000 in 2005 to 70,504,000 in 2050 (using the medium fertility variant – with ‘high’ it drops to 79,164,000, with ‘low’ it drops to 62,633,000, and with fertility remaining steady from 2008 it drops to 67,233,000). This is probably because of an ageing population and low fertility rates. The UK’s population, even projected with the highest fertility rates, is lower in 2050 than Germany’s current population.
Here’s what’s left out. There are a number of ways Germany can try to stop this decline. I’ll give you a clue as to what one of these might be. It starts with an ‘I’ and ends with ‘migration’.
*I worked this out by taking the UK’s population for 2005 and calculating what 83% of that would be to give England’s population in 2005 (50,016,630). I then worked out the total rise in the UK’s population between 2005 and 2050 (using the medium fertility projection that would be 12,104,000) and added it to England’s 2005 population to give a total of 62,120,630. Germany’s medium fetility population projection for 2050 is 70,504,000. Even with a low projection it is 62,633,000.
Categories: Immigration |
33 Comments
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 | 24 Comments
