Bad News for Refugees

Front matter

Greg Philo, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald

First published 2013 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 SAA www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Brief History of Contemporary Migration and Asylum

The Political, Economic and Environmental Contexts of Migration

Introduction to Newspaper Content

The newspaper sample from 2006 was also drawn from 16, 17 and 18 May 2006:?

e Telegraph (16 May 2006) ‘Analysis: all we have to show after Blair’s nine-year campaign for justice’

° Telegraph 1 (17 May 2006) ‘Confessions of the removal mar

e Telegraph 2 (17 May 2006) ‘The gentleman from Whitehall knows little’

e Telegraph 1 (18 May 2006) ‘Commentary: it must be time for Labour to take the blame’

e Telegraph 2 (18 May 2006) “A decade” to remove illegal migrants’

e Mirror 1 (17 May 2006) “No point” chasing migrants’

e Mirror 2 (17 May 2006) ‘Labour cock-ups no longer surprise us’

e Mirror 3 (17 May 2006) ‘Migrants in “let off”

e The Times 1 (17 May 2006) ‘Immigration control a mockery’

© The Times 2 (17 May 2006) ‘Officials “haven’t the faintest idea” of immigrant count

¢ The Times 1 (18 May 2006) ‘Labour fails to shake off 50 years of vulnerability on immigration issues’

e The Times 2 (18 May 2006) ‘A Reid agenda’

e The Times 3 (18 May 2006) ‘The issues’

e The Times 4(18 May 2006) ‘We don’t have a precise figure on this’

© The Times 5 (18 May 2006) ‘Asylum seekers in the UR’

e Express (16 May 2006) ‘An anti-British ideology that is just as sinister as the extreme right’

e Express 1 (17 May 2006) ‘Revealed: how asylum seekers use your taxes to smuggle in relatives’

2 A Lexis Nexis search using the search terms ‘asylum’, ‘refugee(s)’, ‘immigrant(s)’ and ‘immigration’ produced 131 articles, a sample which was narrowed by selecting those articles that were most typical and related to the key stories of that period. We also excluded those articles that did not concern immigration to the United Kingdom. The final sample comprised 42 articles drawn from the Sun (7), the Guardian (5), the Mirror (4), the Daily Mail (6), The Times (8), the Express (6) and the Telegraph (6). Of these 34 discussed asylum seekers or asylum issues predominantly, or alongside economic migrants, and the data trends were drawn from this category unless otherwise stated ( Sun - 4, Mail - 6, Express — 4, The Times — 7, Telegraph - 5, Mirror - 3, Guardian — 4).

e Express 2 (17 May 2006) ‘Now we give up chasing illegals’

e Express 1 (18 May 2006) ‘Blair and co haven't the faintest idea how to protect our shores’

e Daily Mail (16 May 2006) ‘The drug godfather’

e Daily Mail 1 (17 May 2006) ‘Haven’t got the faintest! Civil servant in charge of deportations is asked how many illegal migrants there are in the UK. And his reply?

e Daily Mail 2 (17 May 2006) ‘Comment: wide open Britain: the shocking truth’

¢ Daily Mail 1 (18 May 2006) ‘The Home Office is a mess say Reid’s staff?

e Daily Mail 2 (18 May 2006) ‘Deportations to take a decade says minister’

e Daily Mail 3 (18 May 2006) ‘The lunatics are STILL in charge of the asylum; as ministers and civil servants admit they haven't a clue what’s going on, the author of a devastating report on our immigration system says...

e Sun 1 (17 May 2006) ‘Lesbian faker win’

e Sun 2 (17 May 2006) ‘Human right law will stay’

e Blunkett, D., Sun (17 May 2006) ‘It’s easy to cop out on illegals’

e Sun 3 (17 May 2006) ‘We don’t bother to hunt down illegals’

e Guardian (16 May 2006) ‘Comment and debate: ignorant opposition: the prime minister is undermining public confidence in the rule of law and the judiciary’

e Guardian 1 (18 May 2006) ‘Leading article: illegal immigration: removed from reality’

e Guardian 2 (18 May 2006) ‘Comment and debate: diary’

e Guardian 3 (18 May 2006) ‘Vast bulk of foreign prisoners to be deported after sentence, Blair says: political briefing: Department of Sin in a spin’

e Guardian 4 (18 May 2006) ‘Asylum: asylum seeker injured in jump from second floor’.

Most of our data was drawn from this asylum seekers sample, but we considered other articles as evidence of the wider debate on the context of immigration. Only one article concentrated solely on a refugee:

e Sun (16 May 2006) ‘Wheelchair don is jailed 22 years’.

And one concerned specifically economic migrants:

e Sun 4 (17 May 2006) ‘70,000 Poles in Scotland’.

A further seven articles either discussed ‘immigrants’, often without it being clear which type of migrant was being discussed, or referred to a story that concerned all groups of immigrants together, including asylum seekers and refugees:

e Telegraph 3 (18 May 2006) ‘Big Brother immigration service is not the answer’

e Mirror (18 May 2006) ‘I want all foreign prisoners deported (but that doesn’t mean all); Blair’s new pledge’

e The Times 6 (18 May 2006) ‘We'll send prisoners back to “unsafe” countries, says Blair’

e Express 2 (18 May 2006) ‘Rattled Blair gets a battering on the migrants we can’t catch’

e Express 3 (18 May 2006) ‘Close all our borders and end this immigration crisis’

e Sun (18 May 2006) ‘PM sunk on exile ’em vow’

e Guardian 5 (18 May 2006) ‘PM promises tough line on deportations’.

Who Speaks

We considered the range of voices included in the 34 articles that discussed asylum (or asylum alongside economic migration), and the position that these took on support, resources, or right to remain for the migrant group they were discussing (the groups were often conflated in the statements). Negative statements included phrases such as ‘no right to be here’, ‘coming here for benefits, taking taxpayers’ money’ and ‘we should be deporting more’. Of the total 99 statements recorded for quoted speakers, 42 were negative and critical, and just five speakers made statements that were supportive.

Statements and sources cited by the journalists in the articles were most commonly attributed to politicians (81 statements’ across the

3 38 from the total of 81 politicians’ statements recorded were critical of provision of support, resources or ‘right to remain’ in relation to those they were discussing, and two defended it.

34 articles in the sample of articles dealing with asylum or asylum and economic migration). Of these, 66 statements came from governmental politicians and authorities including civil servants, of which 24 were critical of provision of support. An example is the statement by Tony Blair regarding the 1,023 released prisoners who were not deported, that ‘those people... should be deported irrespective of any claim that they have that the country to which they are going back may not be safe’ (The Times 2, 17 May 2006). Two expressed a positive position. The first came from Tony McNulty MP, who was quoted in The Times saying it may not be possible to deport ‘foreign national prisoners’ ‘because of the parlous state of a particular country’ (The Times 2, 17 May 2006). By implication he was acknowledging that they should be allowed to remain in the United Kingdom. In the other article, in the Sun, David Blunkett noted that ‘if families are genuinely facing death and torture back home... then we should treat them fairly and caringly’. In this example, however, Blunkett also stated that this group had declined in numbers, that support should be temporary, and he expressed a strong critical message about people he spoke of as ‘illegals’ (Blunkett, Sun, 17 May 2006). Of the 16 statements from politicians not belonging to the party of government, 14 were negative and none advocated the provision of support.*

Refugees and asylum seekers themselves made up just 3 per cent of the total number of included statements. These statements were only cited in an article in the Express, and were positive. There were two negative comments from anti-immigration think-tank Migration Watch, one in the Express and one in the Daily Mail.

Themes in the Coverage

In the content of the actual television and press news reports, we identified eight key themes in the coverage:

4 Only one statement was attributed to a human rights/refugee organisation, in the Express, and two statements were attributed to international authorities and governments, also in the Express. Lawyers and judges were quoted seven times: twice in the Mail, three times in the Express and once each in the Sun and Guardian. One of these statements asserted the migrants’ rights. There were also three recorded statements from academics and other independent experts, two of which were critical of support, resources or ‘tight to remain’ for the migrants they discussed.

e conflation of forced and economic migration

e numbers and exaggeration

e burden on welfare and job market

e criminality, threat, deportation and human rights

e the need for ‘immigration control’

e the benefits of immigration

e problems facing asylum seekers

e global capitalism, imperialism and western responsibility.

We will discuss each of these in turn, and the role that they played in establishing specific meanings in the news texts.

Conflation of Forced and Economic Migration On TV News

There was common usage of the term ‘illegal immigrant’ across national news reports, along with the derivative ‘illegals’. Asylum seekers are therefore considered within debates about ‘illegal immigration. Some of these programmes used the term ‘illegal immigrant’ in the headline, and only the Scottish regional broadcasts avoided the term altogether and consistently used the term ‘refugees’ when referring to asylum issues, despite the first of these programmes being about fraud in asylum claims (BBC1 Reporting Scotland, 16 May 2006; BBC2 Newsnight Scotland, 18 May 2006).

Much of the coverage was structured around the assumption that ‘illegal immigration’ is the result of ‘abuse of’ and ‘problems in’ the asylum system. As has been mentioned earlier, this is an explanation offered by the two main parties, and is reflected in public opinion in relation to asylum (Finney and Peach, 2005: 28). In the 17 May BBC2 Newsnight, the pejorative term ‘illegals’ was introduced into the debate by Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch. A Home Office Minister was interviewed, and used the expression ‘many of these illegals’. During the discussion the presenter asked ‘why the government had failed to meet its target of removing more people than had failed

5 In the following broadcasts: BBC 6 O’Clock News - 17 May 2006; ITV Evening News — 17 May 2006; Channel 4 News - 16 May 2006; Channel 4 News - 17 May 2006; BBC Newsnight - 17 May 2006; BBC Newsnight — 18 May 2006.

[asylum] claims’. The Minister commented that the solution to ‘illegal immigration’ lies in the asylum system, ‘that goes precisely to Nick’s point about getting the asylum system in order, which ... has been precisely what we're doing’ (BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006).

In the course of this interview, the studio backdrop showed Sangatte (a young man attempting to climb over a barbed-wire fence), often centred between the newscaster and the Minister. The Minister commented directly on this Sangatte footage, saying, ‘the illegal population, such as it is, is multilayered and segmented, it’s not just as the pictures behind you show those climbing over fences, very often it’s those who come quite legitimately for six months’. The newscaster replied, “Those are the visible ones’ (17 May 2006). These ‘visible ones’ were actually from 2001, and were individuals who were potentially seeking asylum.

How many would claim asylum and how many would leave was a persistent theme in news reports. The ITV Evening News broadcast on 17 May, with its focus on ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘illegal immigration’, included the question asked to a Home Office official, ‘How many people have claimed asylum since ’97 and how many of these have left the country? (ITV Evening News, 17 May 2006). There was no mention of how claims might be rejected erroneously. The Refugee Council has noted that 30 per cent of rejected cases are awarded refugee status on appeal (2010b).

Some coverage took the entry of people on overcrowded boats or hidden in the back of a lorry as absolute evidence that they were ‘illegal immigrants’. This was evident in reports in the Newsnight of 18 May 2006 from South Africa and Spain. These were introduced by the newscaster as ‘two countries calling for help to cope with migrants who've arrived uninvited’ (BBC2 Newsnight, 18 May 2006 — our emphasis). It is inaccurate and misleading to refer to refugees as ‘uninvited’. The Refugee Convention establishes the right for anyone to seek refuge anywhere in the world; it is a legally guaranteed invitation. In the report on Australia, the newscaster’s first question regarding the automatic detention of asylum seekers referred to them inaccurately as ‘unauthorised arrivals’ when in fact the UNHCR guidelines and the terms of the Refugee Convention are clear to point out that refugees are always ‘authorised’ to enter a country and seek asylum (BBC2 Newsnight,

18 May 2006). The report from Spain claimed that ‘Spain aims to send most of these immigrants back home but if no solution is found within 40 days they have to let them go’ This statement should not apply to refugees seeking asylum who cannot return to their homeland (BBC2 Newsnight, 18 May 2006 — emphasis ours).

Some coverage in this sample focused more specifically and critically on public debates around refugees and asylum. BBC2 Newsnight Scotland on 18 May opened with the statement that ‘we take the debate on from those “seeking a better life” to those fleeing persecution’. The newscaster made the point that refugees seeking asylum are being conflated with economic migrants in the ‘wider debate’ on ‘{mmigration’. She stated that forced migrants are not merely ‘seeking a better life’, a phrase actually used by a journalist in the BBC2 Newsnight broadcast that preceded this programme on the same night. The newscaster then gave viewers key information on the international protections that are legally accorded to refugees seeking asylum: ‘under international law it looks like an open and shut case: if you fear persecution you can seek asylum in another country and if that fear is genuine you must be granted refugee status’ (BBC2 Newsnight Scotland, 18 May 2006).

This presenter challenged the perspective in other media accounts, saying, ‘Daily headlines reveal a different reality, asylum seekers are being caught up in a wider debate from immigration to terrorism (BBC2 Newsnight Scotland, 18 May 2006 — our emphasis). Another journalist later in the programme also commented on the impacts on public understanding, noting that ‘refugees and asylum seekers have become conflated in the public mind with economic migration, the nondeportation of foreign criminals and the so-called “war on terror” (BBC2 Newsnight Scotland, 18 May 2006).

In the press sample, issues of asylum were usually discussed alongside economic migration issues, very often without specifying different groups and using language such as ‘illegal immigrants’ to talk about both economic migrants and asylum seekers who have had their claims rejected. The term ‘illegal immigrant (or variations such as ‘people living here illegally’, ‘illegals’ or ‘illegal population’) was prevalent, appearing 90 times in 34 articles. The highest usage was found in the Mail (25), The Times (18), the Telegraph (13), the Express (7), the Sun (7) and the Mirror (7). There were many examples where this term was used to include asylum seekers and rejected asylum seekers, for example in the Daily Mail: “illegal migrants, including an estimated 285,000 failed asylum seekers’ (Daily Mail 1, 17 May 2006).

The Guardian also used the term ‘illegal immigrant’ 13 times. However, in one of these reports it criticised what it calls a ‘rare but .. revealing slip’ from Conservative Party leader David Cameron in the Commons, who referred to ‘illegal asylum seekers’ (Guardian 2, 18 May 2006). The Guardian called attention to this as ‘an incendiary term much favoured by the smaller of our nation’s newspapers’, and even pointed out that it is ‘a category of person that, in the authoritative view of the Refugee Council, cannot in fact exist? (Guardian 2, 18 May 2006). It is important to note that the Guardian articles that used the term ‘illegal immigrant’ often sought to debunk the alarmist accounts of ‘floods’ entering Britain, which accompanied use of this term in other papers. For example, one article in which nine uses of the term were recorded stated that:

illegal immigration is a global phenomenon, affecting rich regions of north America and Europe as well as poorer ones like north Africa and central America ... published UK estimates of an illegal population of 480,000 mark us as a fairly typical north European country, not the world’s illegal immigration honey-pot of the tabloid imagination. (Guardian 1, 18 May 2006)

As mentioned above, one common site of confusion is the way in which, according to the UNHCR, asylum seekers are often forced to arrive. The UNHCR says:

UK immigration controls, much like many other states particularly in Europe, provide very limited legal channels for a refugee to enter in order to apply for recognition of their refugee status. As a result, most refugees seeking to enter the UK are forced to do so ‘illegally’, either using forged travel documents, or avoiding immigration controls altogether.

Since refugees may flee suddenly and may not have any of their papers, they often cannot enter the country through the usual means. The Refugee Convention to which the United Kingdom has signed up recognises this, and states that countries must not penalise those arriving in ways that would normally be illegal. Yet the assumption is sometimes made, particularly in the press, that all people who enter the country without documentation, or covertly, are ‘illegal immigrants’. Examples of this occurred five times in the 34 articles. In the Daily Mail, for instance, one editorial about ‘illegal immigration’ mentioned visa overstayers briefly before saying that the ‘Home Office can give no accurate idea of how many failed asylum seekers are at large’. It asserted that ‘These groups make up the vast majority of the illegal immigrants living here. Thousands also sneak in undetected each year in the back of lorries’ (Daily Mail 2, 18 May 2006).

Another article in the Telegraph talked about ‘clandestine entrants’ along with ‘failed asylum seekers’ as being ‘illegal immigrants’ (Telegraph 1, 17 May 2006). In another article the Daily Mail discussed the report ‘Welcome to the asylum’ from 2001 (mentioned also in the BBC2 Newsnight broadcast, 17 May 2006), which stated:

I watched one illegal immigrant cut his way through the canvas roof of a lorry. He stood on the tarmac, dazed but happy, and immediately claimed asylum. He did not mind being found; he knew he was in Britain for good.

The sense that asylum seekers were fraudulent was supported by language such as ‘asylum cheats’, ‘frauds’, ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and ‘scamming’ in twelve out of the 34 articles discussing asylum. For example, one article in the Telegraph argued that ‘the surge in what became known as “bogus” asylum seeking and illegal immigration began when travel became easier after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Telegraph 1,18 May 2006). The system was described as being ‘abused’ or ‘exploited’ five times in our sample. James Frayne from the Taxpayers Alliance was quoted in the Express saying, ‘They have created a climate which encourages everyone to think they can get away with abusing the system’ (Express 1, 17 May 2006). Some papers also highlighted particular cases of ‘fraudulent’ asylum, seeking to highlight what were seen as unjust incidences of people allowed to stay for human rights reasons because it had taken so long to assess their case, including the Sun’s article ‘Lesbian faker win’ (Sun 1, 17 May 2006). The Express used the phrase ‘bogus asylum seekers’ twice in one article discussing the deportation of rejected asylum seekers, and made the assumption that if their application was rejected this must mean that they were frauds. One such use was in criticism of the 1998 Human Rights Act (Express 1, 18 May 2006). The article stated that ‘The Human Rights Act of 1998, which the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith absurdly regards as the Government's “greatest achievement” has in practice turned into a charter for foreign criminals, overstayers and bogus asylum seekers’ (Express 1, 18 May 2006 — our emphasis).

This article also said that:

Exposing the chronic incompetence of his own department, [Dave Roberts] went on to confess that he didn’t have a clue how many bogus asylum seekers had been deported, nor how many overstaying foreign nationals had been told to leave the country.

(Express 1, 18 May 2006 — our emphasis)

This theme of ‘bogus’ and ‘fraudulent’ claimants often supported calls for deportation of asylum seekers, which were found in twelve of the 34 articles that discussed asylum seekers or asylum and economic migration, and most often in the Times and the Telegraph (three times each).

Threatening Numbers On TV News

The statistics used in these news reports were often unsourced, unclear and situated amongst superlatives and rhetoric.® Asylum applications had fallen from 84,132 in 2002 to 23,608 in 2006, a 72 per cent reduction (Blinder, 2011). But in the national media in 2006, much of the focus was on numbers of ‘illegal immigrants’. The conflation of asylum issues with economic migration often coincided with and was

6 The regional programme Newsnight Scotland did, however, present sourced UN statistics that there are globally ‘9 million refugees’, and when ‘asylum seekers’ and other ‘displaced persons’ are considered, ‘that figure more than doubles’ (18 May 2006).

included within the speculation over numbers of ‘illegal immigrants’. In this period a key stimulus for coverage was a statement made by Tony Blair in the House of Commons, where he explained that ‘There are no official estimates for the numbers of illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom. By its very nature illegal immigration is difficult to measure and any estimates would be highly speculative’ (ITV Evening News, 17 May 2006).

The TV coverage then provided estimated figures for the ‘real’ number of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom. ITV Evening News (17 May 2006) for example produced a statistic of ‘400,000 illegal immigrants’, then extended the assertion that illegal immigrants are ‘free to stay and free to work in the United Kingdom’, though all those who enter are legally subject to immigration controls. There is little distinction here between people who are seeking asylum in the United Kingdom (whose claims might have been rejected despite their being genuine refugees) and economic immigrants. The use of ‘alarmist statistics’ in combination with the labelling of asylum seekers as ‘illegal immigrants’ was observed as a characteristic of coverage of Sangatte in the Cardiff Centre for Journalism study (Buchanan et al., 2003: 52). The Independent Race Monitor’s Report has also criticised the focus on asylum numbers in the media, arguing that this encourages the belief that the numbers coming into the country are large (Coussey, 2005).

The BBC2 Newsnight programme on 17 May 2006 dedicated 16 minutes, including a report, a studio discussion and an interview with a Home Office Minister, to discussing numbers of ‘illegal immigrants’. The report was introduced with the above statement from the Prime Minister that any ‘estimates would be highly speculative’. The programme then attempted to speculate about possible ‘numbers of illegal immigrants’. There was a report by a former immigration official, who cited an estimated figure commissioned by the government from Professor John Salt of University College London of ‘half a million’ illegal immigrants, based on the global numbers of “illegal entrants’. John Reid was then shown stating the figure to be ‘about 400,000’. Professor Salt has stated himself, however, that ‘no country in the world’ has an absolute figure (House of Lords, 2008). The former immigration officer attempted to enlarge Salt’s estimate, adding ‘two pools of migrants’ because he claimed that the figure

‘doesn’t include all those not working nor dependants’. He thus increased the total figure to 1 million. He then argued that the United Kingdom presents various ‘incentives’ to migrants that would attract more than average, and justify a still-higher figure.

This speaker then asked for an estimate of ‘illicit entry’ from Harriet Sergeant (from the Centre for Policy Studies think tank), who produced a 2001 report on asylum ‘after spending many weeks with immigration service staff? (BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006). She then gave her own estimate as ‘300,000 people coming in just in Dover alone, but for the whole country we have no idea’. She made the extraordinary statement that ‘any number of people can come into this country, nothing is stopping them’ (BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006). The former immigration officer then assured his audience — using language implying certainty — that ‘either way you have to conclude that the total number of illegal migrants living in Britain today has to be in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands’ (BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006, our emphasis).

These conclusions set the tone of the studio discussion and the Home Office Minister’s interview that followed the report. The newscaster took up this same issue with all three contributors, and several more caveats were given which acknowledged what the Prime Minister had said about the impossibility of determining numbers of ‘illegal immigrants’ in the United Kingdom.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg: ‘Well, since we don’t know where they are, since we don’t know how many people there are, it’s extremely difficult to know what you do?

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty: I would say that theres no official estimate.

Newscaster: “Yes, but none of us really knows how many illegals.’

(BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006 — our emphasis)

These are caveats within a wider discussion characterised by speculation about numbers. The newscaster went on both to cite figures (‘hundreds of thousands or perhaps quarter of a million according to Sir Andrew Greer’) and to ask for them (‘I’m asking you, what’s your figure”). The report, the studio debate and the interview with the Home Office Minister all presented the viewer with variable estimates and unqualified figures, with an overall sense of increasing numbers and the potential threat that these pose.

The BBC1 6 O’Clock News (17 May 2006) referred to numbers having ‘ballooned’, and stated that the Home Office struggled with the ‘sheer scale of illegal immigration’: claims not supported by figures. The Newsnight programme on 18 May 2006 was headlined ‘Is immigration an unstoppable force? (our emphasis). Such commentaries differ markedly from the tone of the Guardian article we noted above, and its conclusion that ‘an illegal population of 480,000 mark[s] us as a fairly typical north European country’ (18 May 2006,).

A vocabulary implying threat was also deployed with the imagery of natural disaster (‘wave of Africans’, ‘flooding’, ‘staunching the flow’). Disaster rhetoric evokes people arriving in huge unmanageable numbers and implies an inherent danger, as in this example from BBC2 Newsnight:

Headline: Is immigration an unstoppable force? And is it a force for good or ill?

It’s not just a row over the number of illegal immigrants in Britain, we’re in Spain where a new wave of Africans is flooding to the Canary Islands into the EU, in America where George Bush is intent on staunching the flow of Mexican immigrants and in South Africa struggling with an influx of 2 million Zimbabweans. We'll be asking if anyone wants huddled masses any more.

(BBC2 Newsnight, 18 May 2006 - our emphasis)

Images of George Bush and a US Border Patrol vehicle and uniformed officers further intensified this sense of threat. The language of ‘natural disaster’ is often used in this way to imply the ‘threat’ of illegal immigration, a phenomenon which was criticised by the Glasgow Media Group and subsequently by the Cardiff School of Journalism. Nonetheless, the BBC has failed to ‘staunch the flow’ (Philo and Beattie, 1999; McLaughlin, 1999; Buchanan et al., 2003).

BBC2 Newsnight on 18 May also discussed the historical scale of migration, and the newscaster spoke of 20th-century ‘mass migration on an unprecedented scale’. This was actually contradicted in the first report on the programme, which argued that ‘The last time the world experienced a global flux like this was in the decades before the First World War? Robert Reich, the former US Labor Secretary, later said during the studio discussion that:

in about 1890 we had ...12 per cent of our population born outside the United States. Right now we have about 12 per cent of our population born outside the United States. In other words the great wave of immigration in the late 19th century is being replicated right now. (BBC2 Newsnight, 18 May 2006)

Reich stated that the current level of migration was not unmanageable, that if ‘we did it then, I think we can do it now’. There was no comment on this, but the newscaster did claim that of ‘191 million migrants’ globally, ‘more than half? came to ‘just ten countries including the UR’, implying that the ‘burden’ accepted by these ten was disproportionate, and including the United Kingdom in this. But of course if the United Kingdom was really taking one tenth of these migrants, then this would be over 9 million people. These figures are beyond even the views of Migration Watch.

Newsnight continued to pursue the issue of numbers and ‘failed claims’. On the previous evening the newscaster had asked the Home Office minister, ‘last year when we were dealing with the question why the government had failed to meet its target of removing more people than had failed claims .... Presumably those figures are now available. Have you met the target? (BBC2 Newsnight, 17 May 2006). There was a focus on how many the United Kingdom could deport, and how quickly, rather than asking whether the United Kingdom should be deporting people to unsafe countries. The arguments about huge numbers of ‘illegals’ from a ‘failing’ asylum system lose credence when reports by the UNHCR are considered. It criticised the high number of refusals to grant refuge in the United Kingdom.