Greg Palast - immigrants and statistics

I'm still reading "The Best Democracy Money can Buy" by Greg Palast I've just got to the point regarding immigration and how he can't believe the fuss we made/make in the UK about it. When the book was written he says that America let in 2.5 million immigrants, the UK 129,000 how pathetic we seem.

Okay hopefully you know me enough by now to know that I don't take figures like that lying down. Even though these are old figures it's still a relevant argument today. We're back to the good old statistics shuffle.

Wow 2.5m compared to 129k that's about 5%. We only let in 5% of people compared to the US aren't we terrible. Right lets start with the obvious - UK population: 60,609,153, US population: 298,444,215. So percentages per population UK: 0.2%, US 0.8%. Oh dear still not good, but much better then the apparent 20x difference first stated.

Let's try again, that's the beauty of statistics if you don't like the results you get to do something else with them. Provided you don't change the raw data you're fine and dandy.

This time I'll go for population density, this is actually a much more meaningful methodology for this topic.

I'll use land area, some land of course is impossible or difficult to live on, but as no-one seems to have done a proper study of that (or at least made it available to the public) I'll pretend that we have a flat surface of the same area and are distributing the population on that.

UK land area: 241,590km² US land area: 9,161,923km². So density for the is UK: 251 people/km²; US: 33 people/km² Wow that's a big difference. What happens when we add in our immigrants? Well the UK density increase by 0.5 people/km² and the US by 0.3 people/km²

So we taking less, but we've got to pack them in more tightly. It's like having someone complain that they're taking an extra six passengers in their people carrier while you're only taking three in your Mini. In fact for the US to match our increase in population density they'd have to take in approximately 4.9m immigrants, that's almost double the amount mentioned.

How about our European brethren? To increase their population density by the same amount as the UK with 129k extra people they'd need to take in

France: 341,764
Germany: 186,472
Italy: 156,995
Spain: 266,736

Now if that's what they're taking in then fine; if they're taking in more, we need to do something. If they're taking in less... well next time you hear an EU official on the TV quoting raw figures at you remember what you've read here.

All figures taken from The CIA World Fact Book