British newspapers have started to issue corrections to misleading claims that one in 12 people living in London are “undocumented”.
A report in The Telegraph suggested that London is home to as many as “585,000 illegal migrants”, sparking outrage among right-wing commentators such as Isabel Oakeshott, who claimed to know people’s immigration status just by looking at them when she returns to the UK from Dubai, where she has emigrated.
But, as Zoe Gardiner pointed out on X, the reports are based on spurious data, which newspapers are now urgently correcting.
The Times is the first to publish a detailed correction, noting that the stats relate to people in specific “water resource zones” rather than the whole population of London and that the 1 in 12 figure is at the highest end of that estimate.
The Migration Observatory has also warned that estimates of the UK’s irregular migrant population should be treated with caution, noting that “all figures are highly uncertain and have large margins of error”.
The group told Full Fact that the Telegraph’s analysis was “one more estimate of a number that’s incredibly hard to pin down” and that it was unable to say how accurate its figures were.
It added: “They may be plausible, if towards the upper end of the estimates we’ve seen over the years… yet at the same time much lower estimates may be equally plausible.
“Because of a lack of high quality data, any estimate of this population needs to make a number of relatively arbitrary assumptions to get to a final figure, and different assumptions can mean very different end results.”
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