Tag: immigration

Solidarity with Gary AGAINST Human Rights Abuses

The Tory’s Migration Bill is inhumane

This is the week I unconditionally forgave Gary Lineker for all those awful Walker’s Crisp commercials!

Gary Lineker made a legitimate point about the Tory government’s immigration bill stating that it was an “immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

Gary Linekers migration tweets

Linker is not a BBC employee, he works freelance in his capacity as Match of the Day host, and he was tweeting his opinion about the government’s proposed Immigration Bill as a private individual rather than in a professional capacity on his personal Twitter account.

And for this Lineker was suspended from presenting Match of the Day by the BBC management.

What the management didn’t expect was that several other football hosts and pundits would come out in solidarity with Gary and refuse to take part in Match of the Day on Saturday and related football shows over the weekend, one result of which was a reduced MOTD of 20 minutes!

By Monday 13th March the BBC had apologised for any misunderstanding and confusion surrounding their social media policy for staff and had agreed to reinstate Lineker to MOTD.

This event highlights several sociological themes:

  1. The migration issue itself – Lineker is right to highlight this issue, and I think that’s what we should be focussing on.
  2. A secondary issue is that it shows the BBC is biased towards right wing views and is prepared to censor left wing criticism on its behalf.
  3. It reminds us of the direct ties between the Tory government and the current head of the Corporation. This whole event was an example of social capital being played out.
  4. It shows us how the media operates to distract us from the really important political issue at hand – we have not been discussing the politics of migration over the weekend, we’ve been discussing Gary Lineker, and his dog!

You can read a summary of the Gary Lineker saga in The Guardian.

The discourse around migration

Lineker’s statement that the language the Tories are using is like that used in 1930s Germany is factually accurate.

A former United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights made a similar point back in 2015 referencing the language Tories were using to describe Britain’s ‘immigration problem’ at that time.

tory language against migrants like 19030s Germany

David Cameron has used the term ‘swarms’ to refer to people coming to Britain, and Theresa May has previously stated that migration to the UK makes it ‘impossible to build a cohesive society’.

The similarity with the 1930s lies in the discussions that were had at the 1938 Evian Conference in the which the UK, USA and other countries discussed the issue of accepting Jews from Germany in response to Nazi policies.

The allies decided not to allow significant numbers of Jews to migrate, with the Austrian minister at that time stating that to do so would be to ‘import Germany’s race problem to the rest of Europe’.

It is this language of othering and the inhumane approach to the plight of refugees fleeing persecution which we see mirrored today in Tory rhetoric against migration.

More recently the inhuman being and current Home Secretary that calls herself Suella Braverman has referred to the small boat crossings to the UK as an invasion and said there were possibly billions of people who want to come to the UK, greatly exaggerating the extent of immigration.

In reality, migration to Britain is relatively low compared to other countries, and a larger problem may well be the government’s inability to process applications swiftly, which helps create a problem that simply doesn’t have to be a problem.

The current Immigration Bill would automatically ban anyone with a legitimate claim to asylum from coming to the UK if they previously tried to enter illegally. So literally, if there is another genocide somewhere in the world and someone tries to to escape that by coming to Britain illegally and gets caught, there is no way they can ever get back here by formal channels.

And of course the formal channels are very very very narrow!

This video by Jonathan Pie does a nice job of explaining the issue….

The biased BBC

Just to stress this is a minor point, the main issue really is the inhumane immigration bill, but the fact that the BBC decided to ban Lineker from presenting MOTD in attempt to get him to apologies for tweeting facts shows how the BBC is biased in favour of right wing Tory rhetoric.

Note that Alan Sugar, another prominent BBC personality has previously tweeted supporting Brexit and has tweeted against Corbyn, but he faced no sanction.

So here we have it, a straight up example of overt right wing bias from the BBC, a literal attempt to censor the views of someone who is (rightly) stating facts that are anti-government.

Elite media and government networks

As to why this bias this also seems clear. The current Chairman of the BBC has direct links to the Tory party: he previously helped Boris Johnson secure an $800 000 loan and then didn’t declare it when applying for the job, he’s currently under investigation.

And there were a lot of messages of complaint sent by Tory party members about Lineker’s Tweet being in breach of the BBC impartiality rules, which clearly wasn’t the case, but the pressure was enough for the BBC to ban Lineker and get itself into this mess.

Distraction politics

While it is heartwarming to see a celebrity come out in favour of vulnerable and his friends come out in solidarity with him, let’s not forget the real issue: we should be waging war against the Tory policy of immigration, the Lineker and BBC fracas is a distraction!

This Tory government is disgusting: they are incompetent, 40 years of Tory policies have driven our economy into the ground, especially Brexit and Liz Truss’ budget, and now they are trying to scapegoat migrants, which is a distraction from their own incompetence.

Unfortunately this Linker episode is in danger of being another layer of distraction away from the migration issue, we need to be careful to remember who the real problem is – the Tory party!

Signposting

This material is relevant to anyone who cares about people, the issue of globalisation and global development and also media studies.

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Sources

The Guardian (2015) Refugee rhetoric echoes 1938 summit before Holocaust, UN official warns.

Decades of Racist Immigration Policy

A recent report produced by the Home Office (by an unnamed historian) has found that the Windrush Scandal was caused by decades of racist immigration policies.

In case you don’t remember it, the Windrush Scandal first came to public attention in 2018 when it came to light that 83 ethnic minority immigrants to the UK had been wrongly deported, with some of them having been living in the UK (legally) for several decades.

A larger, and still unknown number of victims were subjected to Home Office interrogation over their legal immigration status in the UK and had their lives seriously disrupted as a result, some of them losing their jobs.

Previous analysis of the causes of the scandal have pointed to the ‘hostile environment’ towards immigrants which existed under the Home Office when Theresa May was in charge, but the report goes further and suggests a ‘deeper cause’ of decades of institutionalised Racism at the Home Office.

This article in the Guardian outlines the history of some of the racist immigration policies, some of which included quotas for Black and Asian people but not white people (so overt restrictions on the numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean but NOT from the USA or Europe, for example)….

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This update is a useful addition to the migration topic within the family. It shows how government policies influence the type of people that are allowed to move freely between different countries.

It might also help to explain (if you believe the stats) the higher levels of poverty, educational failure, expulsion and crime among Black Caribbean children – the analysis above points out that the experience of black migrants to the UK (and their children) has been very different (for the worse) than that of white people, resulting possibly in blocked opportunities.

This is also of more general application to any question about inequalities in British Society.

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Why is the UK suffering from a Labour Shortage?

There are over 1 million job vacancies in the UK in September 2021, but Brexit isn’t the only reason!

There are currently over a million job vacancies in the UK, which is the most since the Office for National Statistics started keeping records!

Vacancies are mainly concentrated in low-skilled, low paid sectors such as:

  • Fruit and Vegetable Harvesting 
  • Care work  
  • Hotel work – cleaning and making beds

The BBC (link above) provide a very handy overview here:

The consequences of Labour Shortages

The Today Programme (R4 Tuesday 14th September) interviewed Ali Capper, the owner of Stocks Farm in Suckley and chair of British Apples and Pears who stated that she had advertised locally for 70 apple and pear pickers, had only 9 applications, of which one had actually followed through by doing the job.

She pointed out that her industry relies mainly on Eastern European seasonal migrant workers from countries such as Poland and Romania, and there are fewer migrants coming to the UK to work – across the fruit picking industry farms are between 10-35% down on their usual labour force.

In some cases, labour shortages are so bad farmers are telling local consumers to come and help themselves, giving away their produce for free as the only other alternative is to let it rot in the fields.

The Today programme also interviewed a guy who runs a business collecting and cleaning laundry from 12 London hotels who says that labour shortages have forced him to reduce the scale of his business – he has had to turn some of his clients down because he can’t get the staff – despite increasing wages from £10 to £15 an hour.

Why are there so many vacancies in these sectors?

Some of the growers themselves blame the government’s immigration policy since Brexit, claiming it is ideological – they refuse to let more people from Eastern Europe and expect companies that traditionally rely on workers from these countries to adapt and recruit locally.  

Analysis from The London School of Economics however suggests that things are a bit more complex. They idenfity the following reasons:

  • Many migrant workers went home during the the Pandemic to be closer to family and now many of them are reluctant to come back, at least partly because of improved opportunities at home – this was a trend BEFORE the pandemic and Brexit!
  • Brexit has made it more difficult for new migrants to come to the UK and it’s reduced the number of people wanting to come here to work because it’s tainted the UK’s image.
  • These jobs are simply too low paid to attract sufficient people to do them!
  • There are still many people on Furlough, reducing the available labour pool though that is set to come to an end shortly.

On further question we might ask is how so many people in Britain can afford NOT to work – the unemployment rate may be historically low, but there are still 3% of the population unemployed, meaning there are sufficient people in the country to do the jobs, but who are presumably able to survive without working.

The New Right might suggest the government needs to make life more difficult for these people shirking work!

Relevance to A-level sociology

These labour shortages illustrate the problems that can happen when globalisation slows down as a result of international migration becoming more difficult (whatever the reasons) and remind us how crucial global flows of labour are for keeping our economy going.

This topic probably isn’t the most relevant to any of the main modules, but it does apply somewhat to the topics of globalisation and migration, the later being relevant to the family module.

It’s also quite a nice one to get students to apply sociological perspectives too, just to get them thinking!

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What is the Impact of Immigration on Family Life?

Changes to the the dependency ratio and age structure are two impacts.

This post looks at the recent increase in net migration to the UK, and at some of the reasons for increasing immigration in particular, including push and pull factors. It also looks at the impact of immigration on family life in the UK.

Recent Patterns of Migration to the UK

The Office for National Statistics Net migration was actually negative during the 1970s and early 1980s, turning positive but at a relatively low level during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since 1994, it has been positive every year and rose sharply after 1997.

graph showing migration to and from the UK 1970 to 2024

During the 2000s, net migration increased further, partly as a result of immigration of citizens from the countries that have joined the EU since 2004. Since the mid 2000s, annual net migration has fluctuated between approximately 150,000 and 300,000.

From 2018 Net Migration decreased from just over 300 000, coming close to 0 in the pandemic lockdown year of 2020.

However since 2020 net migration increased rapidly to reach 600 000 in 2022.

graph showing increased migration to the UK 2018 to 2022.

Migration statistics to and from the UK in 2022

According to the latest migration statistics from the the ONS(1):

  • 1.2 million people immigrated into the UK 2022
  • 557,000 people emigrated from the UK 
  • This means that net migration to the UK in 2022 was 606,000. 
  • Most people arriving to the UK in 2022 were non-EU nationals (925,000), followed by EU (151,000) and British (88,000).
  • Immigration has been unusually high over the last 18 months of available statistics, primarily due to increased numbers of non-EU people coming to the UK for humanitarian reasons from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Immigration figures should reduce in future years, as they did in the last quarter of 2022. 
  • The proportion of people immigrating to the UK has been decreasing since Brexit.

Why do people come to the UK?

For non-EU nationals the main reasons people came to the UK in 2022 were

  • Study – 39% of non EU immigrants came to the UK to study, mostly at university. 
  • Work – 25% of non EU immigrants come to the UK for work, 
  • 19% of immigrants came via humanitarian routes, such as the Ukraine scheme. 
  • 8% of immigrants entered the UK claiming asylum. 

For EU nationals, the proportions are slightly different: 50% came for work related reasons and a further 25% for study.

Where do people come to the UK from?

According to the Migration Observatory (2) the top birth countries for UK immigrants are:

  1. India (9.3%)
  2. Poland (7.1%)
  3. Pakistan
  4. The Republic of Ireland
  5. Germany
  6. Romania
  7. Nigeria
  8. South Africa
  9. Italy
  10. China

Note that these are not just the origins of people who came to the UK in 2022. They are the birth countries of everyone who came to the UK at some point!

Asylum Seekers Coming to the UK 

In the year ending September 2022, the UK received 72,027 asylum applications from main applicants only (3).

The UK is below the European average for asylum applications and ranks 18th among EU countries per head of population.

Asylum seekers were around eight per cent of immigrants to the UK in 2018.

The number of asylum seekers in the UK has doubled since 2018, but this is a global trend.

What is an asylum seeker?

An asylum seeker is someone who:

  • flees their homeland
  • arrives in another country , whichever way they can
  • makes themselves known to the authorities
  • submits an asylum application
  • has a legal right to stay in the country while awaiting a decision.

The Causes of Increasing Migration to the UK

The simplest level of analysis lies in explaining increasing migration to the UK in terms of push and pull factors:

Push Factors refer to problems which encourage a person to leave or emigrate from their country.

Pull Factors refer to the real or perceived benefits of another country which attract people to it, or migrate towards it.

You should be able to identify a number of  push and pull factors from the material above note down at least two push and pull factors which repel people from other countries and attract them towards the UK.

Increasing globalisation is also fundamentally linked to globalisation, which is covered below. 

The Impact of Immigration on Family Life

There are three main effects of increasing immigration on family life:

  1. Population size is increasing because net migration is increasing. If it were not for high net migration the UK population would be shrinking due to low birth rates, which on their own are below the fertility rate required to replace the population, which is 2.1. babies per woman.
  2. The age structure changes. Immigration lowers that average age of the population both directly and indirectly. Directly because immigrants tend to be younger by 10 years than the British born population. Indirectly because Immigrant women have a higher fertility ratio – they have more babies than British born women.
  3. The dependency ratio changes. Here immigration has three effects:
  • Immigrants are more likely to be of working age and this thus helps lower the dependency ratio.
  • However because they are younger, immigrants have more children and so the immigrants’ children add to the dependent population.
  • Finally, the longer a group is settled in the country, the closer their fertility rate comes to the national average, reducing their distinct impact on the dependency ratio.

Impacts on Public Services..

It is not possible to say with certainty what the implications of migration are for public services, and these impacts are likely to vary by area and depending on the type of public service.

Migrants contribute to demand for public services. If foreign-born people in the UK used public services in the same way as demographically similar UK-born people, they would be expected to make less use of health and social care, but greater use of education.

Migrants also contribute to financing and providing public services, and are over represented in the health care and social care work forces.

The Political Impact of Globalisation 

States now have policies that seek to control immigration, absorb migrants into society and deal with increased ethnic and cultural diversity. More recently policies have also become linked to national security and anti-terrorism policies.

Assimilationism was the first state policy approach to immigration. It aimed to encourage immigrants to adopt the language, values and customs of the host culture, to become ‘like us’. However assimilationist policies have mainly failed because of the desire of many migrants to retain aspects of their ‘culture of origin’.

Multiculturalism accepts that migrants may wish to retain a separate cultural identity. One consequence of multicultural policy is the emergence of multicultural education in schools. However, Eriksen criticises such education as encouraging ‘shallow diversity’ – so we accept the surface elements of other cultures such as Samosas and Saris, but it fails to address issues surrounding ‘deep diversity’ such as arranged marriages.

Since September 11th many politicians have demanded a return to assimilationsim

Two further consequences include –

  • A More Multicultural Society
  • A divided working class and the white working class backlash.

Sources and Signposting

This material is usually taught as part of the families and households module within A-level sociology.

(1) Office for National Statistics: Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022.

(2) The Migration Observatory

(3) UNHCR Asylum in the UK

Sources used to write the above include information from the ONS, British Red Cross and Rob Webb et al’s  AS level Sociology book for the AQA.