Ian Duncan Smith criticised for immigration statistics

The UK Statistics Authority has complained that Duncan Smith’s statistics on immigrants on benefits were rushed out by ministers, and that weaknesses in the data were ignored.

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Source: Independent

Terrifying report on the immigrant girls vanishing into Britain’s sex trade

On the morning of 15 March Joy Vincent left Croydon’s Gilroy Court Hotel, and then she disappeared. No one knows what happened next: whom she met, where she was taken, whether she even went left or right. She had no family, no apparent friends, no one whom the 17-year-old could trust.

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Source: Guardian

End to free language classes for immigrants

The Independent

Other people on so-called “inactive” benefits, such as income support and housing benefits, or those on low incomes – including asylum-seekers and refugees – will have to pay at least 50 per cent of the cost of their courses…..

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Celebrating national treasures made by refugees

To promote Refugee Week UK 2011 a list of the ten greatest British immigrants has been drawn up. Yesterday several hundred refugees, asylum seekers, charity group members and supporters marched from London’s Embankment to the South Bank to highlight …

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Source:Metro

UK immigrant screening misses most latent TB

(Reuters) – British tuberculosis screening for new immigrants fails to detect most imported cases of latent disease and screening should be widened to include more people from the Indian subcontinent, scientists said on Thursday.

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Anger over ESOL cuts

The National Association for Teaching English and Community Languages to Adults has expressed anger at David Cameron’s call for immigrants to speak English, highlighting that his government has cut ESOL funding.

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Source: Guardian

Europe is called to defend incoming immigrants

The rights of all migrants must be protected, regardless of their legal status. This was the central message expressed by participants at a  Jesuit Refugee Service conference held on March 29 in Brussels on the destitution of migrants in Europe.

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‘Tougher’ English language rules

David Cameron has pledged to introduce stringent measures to ensure that immigrants and especially children starting school learn English.

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Source: BBC News

The final straw

Article originally published 12 January 2011 (Institute of Race Relations)

By Jenny Bourne

Why is the former home secretary embroiling himself in a racialised crime issue?

Jack Straw is at it again – saying the unsayable. He seems to think his working-class roots and pragmatic reputation gives him the right to say the racially unsayable or, rather, to racialise the sayable. Straw has joined the fray about gangs of men of Pakistani origin preying on vulnerable white girls for sexual gratification/retribution. It is an explosive allegation incorporating a whole phalanx of issues on which the public is known to be sensitive. But Straw it was who in 2006 suggested that women constituents should remove their face veils in his presence at surgeries.

The issue of ‘Pakistani’ men grooming young, sometimes underage, white girls for sex has been simmering – but mainly on a back burner – for some years. In 2004, a Channel 4 investigative piece ‘Edge of the City’ about Bradford social service’s attempts to deal with the problem was initially withdrawn (and later shown during the summer) after the BNP claimed the contents provided it with a party political broadcast. In fact the BNP went on to produce its own videos about Asian ‘grooming’ and, if you look at its website, it has repeatedly returned to this theme over the years. But it was the Times which thrust the theme into the headlines in the first week of 2011 as it quoted ‘evidence’ based on just fifty-six cases studied by the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London. This was followed by alarmist stories in both the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Libby Brooks in the Guardian[1] pointed out how the Times had created a category of ‘on-street grooming’ which neither existed in law nor was recognised by any social agencies she spoke to. It looks as though the researchers are now, in the wake of the racist reception of their research – with the BNP crowing, ‘we told you so’ – trying to disown the way their findings have been used.[2]

Apart from what is being said, there is also the matter of how and where things are said. Straw did not on this occasion go to his local mosque or Muslim associations in Blackburn with some evidence of local cases that needed to be discussed – or at least there is no evidence that he did. Instead, he made a public pronouncement on BBC’s Newsnight on 8 January about a national ethnic trend for which he gave absolutely no evidence. This followed the sentencing of two Pakistani men for a series of crimes involving the rape and sexual abuse of numerous girls which took place in Derby – hundreds of miles from his constituency in Blackburn.

Straw has legal training and served as Home Secretary for four years, so can hardly be unaware of what constitutes a crime and also how statistics actually stack up. Moreover he is a hardened speaker and well used to dealing with inquisitors such as those on Newsnight. He is unlikely therefore to have been provoked by the heat of the moment into sloppy thinking and intemperate language. But, after starting with the sensible observation that ‘Pakistanis are not the only people who commit sexual offences and overwhelmingly sex offenders’ wings are full of white offenders,’ he went on, ‘But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men who target vulnerable young white girls.’ And worse, he then held the whole of the Pakistani community responsible for ‘their’ reprobates. ‘We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.’ He then managed to visit the problem onto Pakistani culture: ‘These young men act like any other young men. They’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits.’ And finally ended his contribution by echoing misogynistic ghetto language to somehow emphasise his point. ‘So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care, who they think are easy meat.’

There was, as Keith Vaz chair of the home affairs select committee was quick to point out, absolutely no justification for racialising what is a crime and not a community-based cultural trait. He termed Straw’s remarks as ‘pretty dangerous’. No doubt he was aware that a moral panic around an ethnic group could be in the creation. For just as ‘mugging’ was created as a supposed Black crime of robbing white people on the street in the 1970s, a backlash was being provoked against people of Pakistani descent who were now prone to another supposed crime of ‘on-street grooming’ of young ‘indigenous’ girls.

But we can probably guess why Straw did it. He seems to believe that Labour has to move on to the ground and take up the issues that the extremist EDL or BNP might take up. By showing that Labour can also hear working-class dissent, he expects that the Right’s racial agenda will be undermined. But evidence over the past fifteen years reveals the contrary. When mainstream politicians take to the racialised ground, they do not cut the aforesaid ground from under the racists’ feet. Rather they serve to normalise racist arguments. In other words, in this case Straw will be assuring those white working-class people who are already anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ‘anti-P**i’ that there is something in their fears – making extremist arguments mainstream and lending them respectability.

As Vaz implied sexual predators and allied crimes exist in many avatars and cannot be attributed to one ethnic group. Sexual trafficking, grooming, exploitation etc unfortunately are prevalent crimes in the UK and often involve a group of men ie a gang. The women who are their prey will inevitably be some of society’s most vulnerable and rightless. If they had a family, a community, a support system to go to, they would not be victims of such criminals. And where gangs are not involved, the majority of sex crimes actually take place within the family – and that includes Pakistani ones.

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FOOTNOTE

[1] Libby Brooks, ‘Our ignoble tradition of racialising crime is revived’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/07/grooming-racialising-crime-tradition), Guardian 7 January 2011. [2] ‘Child sex trafficking study sparks exaggerated racial stereotypes’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jan/06/child-sex-trafficking-racial-stereotyping), Guardian 6 January 2011. One of the researchers made it clear on Newsnight that evidence from a small study of two areas had been generalised to a national trend.

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Stoking paranoia about migration

The gap between the reality of the Office of National Statistics quarterly migration statistics and the knee-jerkery of much of the media (and not just the tabloids) is as predictable as it is disturbing.

Here are some condensed facts.

Estimated total long-term emigration from the UK in the year to December 2009 was 371,000. This is 13% lower than the final estimate of 427,000 in the year to December 2008, and along with a 35 per cent increase in student visas (362,015 issued), bringing millions of pounds into the country, explains the rise in net migration in the latest figures. Meanwhile, total long-term immigration to the UK in the year to December 2009 was 567,000 compared with the final estimate of 590,000 in the year to December 2008 and at a similar level to that seen since 2004, when the A8 countries of central and eastern Europe joined the EU. There have additionally been sharp falls in the number people coming to work in Britain under the points-based immigration system. The number of temporary employment visas fell by 17 per cent to 66,495. There were half the number of Eastern European arrivals as compared to 2008. And there was a further fall in the number of asylum seekers coming to Britain, down from 25,930 in 2008 to 24,485.

And here are some headlines that bypass or contort these facts.

“Immigration up by a fifth?” (Telegraph), “Net migration double the government’s target” (BBC 10 O’Clock News), “Net immigration up 20% in year” (Sun), “Number of immigrants living in the UK long-term SOARS by 20%” (Mail), “UK Struggles With Net Increase In Immigration” (City News Post), “Rise in immigration adds 200,000 to British population” (This is London) and so on and so on…

Some of them don’t even know the difference between net migration and immigration, it seems.

Thankfully, there have been one or two honourable exceptions. A particular hat-tip to the Financial Times for “Immigration falls to lowest level since 2005″, and to the Guardian for their follow-up story: “Immigration cap will lead to skills shortages, say employers.”

Because the real issues of migration are not primarily about ‘the numbers game’. They are about global economic instability and change, multiple forced people movements, human rights abuses, war and displacement, massive income differentials, the denial of justice to Roma and other minorities, climate change refugees (which is set to be a huge concern) – and, of course, deep-seated prejudice and racism, as Vaughan Jones’ perceptive paper ‘Migration: Why a broader view is needed’ (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/12034) makes clear.

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