A Rough Idea

numbers

> Blairs promise to cut the numbers

His promise was to cut numbers of new asylum seekers -- which happened. Its hard if possible at all to reject asylum applications -- the only way to achieve that is not to have person who will apply for asylum in the first place.

Re: families

Tony Blair in lies shock horror. Imagine that.

Re: families

"The estimate does not include asylum seekers whose claims are being processed, or who are appealing against a refusal. "

So what they are saying is that there are 530,000 people who have been through the asylum process, failed and not been deported. Presumably they also exclude all those who are legally allowed to be here due to the EU expansion. Blairs promise to cut the numbers was simply a reclassifying excercise.

families

Illegal immigrants can't get their families in -- hiding under Eurochannel train is not exactly the thing done by kids and women. My educated guess would be that most immigrants families (or dependents) are here under asylum laws, and they were included in figures since statistics on those are available even though Home Office likes to quote primary asylum seekers without dependents in most of publications.

Re: Estimates Schmestimates

But this figure does not include legal immigrants and their families LB - god knows what the total is for people entering the UK in the last year - any ideas anyone?

estimates

This estimate seems to be reasonably close to those made by people with vested interest against immigration, ie MigrationWatch.

Note that I don't support notion of uncontrolled illegal immigration, I was merely commenting on the figure.

Re: Estimates Schmestimates

See it can't be that bad here can it? Everyone wants a bit of Blighty.

Re: illegals

" total figure is not that high actually" = 8o - that's more than the total population of the city i live near.

Estimates Schmestimates

Up to 570,000 illegal immigrants are living in the UK, according to a new Home Office estimate.

This is the same Home Office that estimated the number of people coming to work in the UK from the EU accession Eastern European countries would be 13,000 in the first year. In fact it was something like that in the first week.

In truth, they have no idea whatsoever.

illegals

Sounds like reasonably correct estimate -- total figure is not that high actually, I think in the USA they cound illegals in many many many millions. So many in fact that in California they rejected reasonable law requiring proof of citizenship for driving license applications.

The Government has published an estimate of illegallimmigrants currently living in the UK. There you are Mr Paxman - knew you'd get an answer eventually.

For those who can't be bothered to read link - estimate is up to 1/2 million

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4637273.stm