Friday 20 January 2012

Bloody foreigners, coming over here taking our jobs and claiming our benefits. And giving us loads of statistics to manipulate.

The basic rule of lying with statistics is to do 'diagonal' rather than like-for-like comparisons, you can 'prove' just about anything that way. But if you look at the figures used to support the claim and do a bit of maths, you usually find that the headline claim is totally misleading, if not a compete lie.

From my archives, on the topic of immigration/racism, we end up with this:

Claim: Critics claim that searches are used disproportionately, with government figures showing that black people are 4.5 times more likely to be searched in London than white people.
Truth: Young blacks are twelve times more likely to commit (or end up being charged with offences) than whites.

Claim: A black person is four times as likely to become a victim of a racist crime than a white person
Truth: A black person is thirty times as likely to be a perpetrator of a racist crime than a white person

Claim: There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues.
Truth: One-in-ten units of social housing which become vacant are given to "recent arrivals" (primarily successful asylum seekers).
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There were two juxtaposed articles on page 2 of today's Evening Standard.

The Mayor [of London] claimed some young people in the capital lacked the "energy" to go out and get jobs which were instead going to immigrants.He highlighted what has become known as the "Pret A Manger phenomenon" which has seen many of the posts at sandwich shops going to newcomers to the city.

"London is a fantastic creator of jobs but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country," Mr Johnson added in an interview in The Sun. "They are hard-working, good people and we need to learn from them and understand what it is that they have got that makes them able to get those jobs that young Londoners don't have."


He's a clever chap is Johnson - he keeps Johnny Foreigner happy by saying something nice about foreign-born people (a huge chunk of the London electorate); he panders to the authoritarians who think the unemployed are just lazy and only have themselves to blame; as well as tapping into the racist sub-text "Bloody foreigners, coming over here, taking our jobs" (which, assuming you subscribe to the lump-of-labour fallacy is perfectly true, as it turns out).

The next article is headed: "A quarter of London migrants claim benefits" which is a complete lie - as the first sentence states, "One in four Londoners claiming benefits was born abroad, new figures reveal today", which is something completely different. Then comes a plethora of statistics on immigrants claiming benefits, illegally or otherwise, culminating with this:

In total, 371,000 individuals born abroad are believed to be on benefits, with nearly half of them in the capital. This high figure is partly explained by the fact that a third of Londoners are non UK-born.

Yes, that's *part* of the explanation.

To pin down the *rest of* the explanation for the apparent discrepancy between "a quarter", "nearly half" and "a third" (which are all totally 'diagonal' comparisons), you just need to know that there are 38 million working age adults in the UK, about 13% of the Uk population is in Greater London, and a tenth of UK residents were born abroad and bung on all the figures into a table (see Google doc here).

Surprisingly enough, the *rest of* the explanation is that foreign-born residents are only two-thirds as likely to be claiming benefits as UK-born residents (9.8% as against 15%). But the Evening Standard can't help reverting to its racist bias and making it look as if London was swamped with unemployed foreigners, when actually it's only 3.5% of the London population.

You might consider that to be 3.5% too many (and to a large extent I do), that's a separate topic.

10 comments:

Bayard said...

My brother was born when my parents were living in the far east. I wonder how many of the "371,000 individuals born abroad", by implication immigrants, are actually nth generation English like him. My guess is, quite a few, or they would have said "immigrants". My paternal grandfather was born in India. Luckily, my grandfather retired from the army before my father was born, or he probably would have been born abroad too.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, splendid anecdotal.

For my part, all I can say is...

My mum was foreign born, and had my parents gone to her country rather than stay here, I would also have been foreign born.

My first wife was also foreign born, as were our children (who all live in the country they were born in, which is where I happened to live at the time, so from that country's point of view, I was foreign born).

My second wife is also foreign born, and from the racist's point of view, our children are "born to a foreign mother".

Which is why I struggle to take the phrase "foreign born" seriously. It would include Spike Milligan, Cliff Richard and all sorts of other people we don't normally regard as foreigners.

dearieme said...

"from the racist's point of view, our children are "born to a foreign mother"." Actually, from anyone's point of view, surely. It's just a statement of fact. What people might make of that fact is a different matter.

Anyway, you might like this from Mish's blog:


virtually everyone with a mortgage is renting debt-money from a lender and leasing the land from a local taxing authority. The mortgagees have a "dead pledge" in the value of the debt owed, not an "asset". The lenders and taxing authorities are the "owners" of a lien (a bond or constraint on the real property), which entitles them to income in the form of compounding interest and tax receipts in perpetuity.

Unreal estate is the best investment for lenders and taxing authorities, not dead-pledgers.

john b said...

Mark: agree with the piece in general, but the (end up being charged with) bit in your first 'truth' can't be skated over like that. Imagine 1% of yoofs regularly carry drugs/knives/guns, and five times as many black yoofs are searched by the cops as white yoofs. That's going to immediately lead to five times as many black yoofs being charged as white yoofs, for exactly the same actual crime rate.

Dearieme: no, if a woman born overseas has British citizenship, only a bigot would call her a foreign mother (as opposed to a foreign-born mother, which would be the statement of fact). Compare: 'Joanna Lumley is an Indian actress' (mad); 'Joanna Lumley is an Indian-born actress' (true).

dearieme said...

"if a woman born overseas has British citizenship, only a bigot would call her a foreign mother ..": now that's plain silly. It would be a distinction easily overlooked, particularly if you happened to be discussing some issue where the distinction happened to be small beer anyway. To accuse someone who made that error of being a bigot has a nasty air of the Witchfinder-General about it.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, that was Mish quoting a Faux Libertarian. not Mish sying it. THe Faux Libertarian is right about bankers being behind land price bubbles, and right that the owner-occupiers don't like it when they burst, but to suggest that land taxes are too high in the USA is just whining. Fact is, if land were correctly taxed, we'd never have house price bubbles and income wouldn't be taxed at all (clearly neither are the case in the USA).

JB: "Imagine 1% of yoofs regularly carry drugs/knives/guns, and five times as many black yoofs are searched.."

Fair point, but the result is not 1 white to 4.5 black convictions, the result is 1 white to 12 black.

Now, it may be that not only are blacks 4.5 more likely to be search, it may also be that if the coppers stop a black with a knife they are 2.66r times more likely to charge the black and let the white go with a stern warning. But it seems a tad unlikely. I think they just commit more crimes.

As to foreign mother vs foreign-born mother terminology

25 8 11: The ONS put out a press release referring to mothers born outside the UK or non-UK born women.

The Telegraph startss off with "foreign-born" but then lapses into "foreign".

The Daily Mail refers to "foreign mothers", "foreigners" and "immigrant mothers".

The BBC seem to stick to "foreign-born mothers" as they are very PC. So in real life it does make a difference.

John Pickworth said...

Just got to this piece Mark and very illuminating it is too. Interestingly, Channel4 News ran a similar piece on Friday (I think)... its now on their Fact Check site: How Many Migrants Are On The Dole?

Now I have to declare a personal interest in these matters. While I'm just about as 100% Anglo-Saxon as you can get (yeah, I recognise the irony in this statement) my partner of 8 years is foreign. However, we've decided that the time is right to bring him here and we're currently awaiting confirmation of his visa - its a complex, expensive and stressful business I can tell you. And this is just the beginning; there will be several more steps to come, all involving the parting of large sums of money - a tax on immigration perhaps?

What does annoy me though is that the Government has made it much more difficult to come to the UK to visit, to study, to work and soon those coming for family reasons (arguably the very groups we should be welcoming) while poor East Europeans coming here to claim benefits and asylum seekers remain untouchable. Surely that cannot be right, can it?

Mark Wadsworth said...

JP, that's a good link.

As to bringing a partner over here, are you married/in a civil partnership? Does that not make it easier?

John Pickworth said...

Proposed civil partners... so we've a little ceremony to do next and then back to Immigration for a 2 year extension of stay (although the Gov may soon increase that to 5 years) and then finally a request to make the stay permanent. At this moment in time we've decided there's little advantage in obtaining full British Citizenship.

So to answer your question; its not so much easier, it just makes it possible.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JP, in that case, hope you have a lovely CPC, keep us informed how it all progresses.