Instead of tracking UK flights supporting genocide, the Telegraph is tracking refugee boats

RAF Akrotiri has been participating in Israel’s genocide in Gaza for over a year. But the Telegraph is one of many mainstream media outlets in the UK which have failed to report on that. Instead, the Telegraph thinks its big and clever to publish a “small boats tracker” focusing on the people who have been escaping war, poverty, and repression to seek a better life in the UK.

We absolutely should talk about immigration, of course. Because Britain is ageing, and we have big skills shortages. Many employers, especially in key areas like health and care, can’t fill their vacancies. Successive governments, meanwhile, refuse to invest appropriately in the education and healthcare sectors to improve the situation. And although people from other countries have a great track record of stepping in to help while contributing more to public finances than average Brits, governments routinely place obstacles to them doing so.

This situation needs to change. Because British citizens aren’t going to magically have more kids overnight. Childcare and housing costs keep rising, incomes and job stability are a big concern, and the future isn’t looking particularly bright, so it’s no wonder that people who can make an informed choice either choose not to have kids or to delay doing so.

The Telegraph: hypocrisy and distraction

The Telegraph points out that “smugglers have ferried more than 150,000 migrants across the English Channel since government records began in 2018 – most often in inflatable small boats”. That’s in six years, and 93% of those people claimed asylum (authorities usually accept only around half of these claims).

To put this into perspective, the UK allowed around 213,000 people from Ukraine in less than two years between 2022 and 2024. As the government’s own statistics clarify:

The number of Ukrainian refugees who arrived in the UK in 2022 was equivalent to the number of people granted refuge in the UK from all origins, in total, between 2014 and 2021.

Nonetheless, the Telegraph doesn’t appear to have had a ‘Ukrainian refugee tracker’.

Ukrainians didn’t really need to arrive in boats. People from countries the UK and its allies have invaded or interfered with in the past, however, do. As the Telegraph says, the most common countries people on the small refugee boats came from last year were Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iran.

The real crisis surrounding immigration is that British governments don’t take responsibility for their actions or address the true causes of immigration. Britain is a junior partner to the destructive US imperialist project, furthering conflicts abroad for its economic benefit.

The right thing to do would be to welcome in civilians who suffer as a result. But because racism and xenophobia are effective tools for distracting people from the super-rich individuals and their lackeys who are truly responsible for Britain’s problems, the country only opens its arms wide when the victims are white Christians.

Let’s spread the truth about immigration

Economic demand pulls people to the UK. And what pushes people from their own countries is the urge to seek a better life by escaping from death, destruction, repression, and poverty resulting from the global economic system which US imperialism champions. There are solutions out there, but none are likely to happen any time soon:

• British governments could reduce demand for immigrant workers by heavily investing in people in the UK and encouraging family growth, so there are enough people to fill the job vacancies that exist.
• Britain and other wealthy nations could discourage people from leaving their home countries by respecting international law, human rights, and the planet, making sure that the rich and powerful face consequences if they don’t. Ending imperial pursuits (economic or military) would undoubtedly have a big impact. The less war and global inequality there was, the less need there would be for people to leave their homes behind.
• Creating a hostile environment for immigrants doesn’t work either. Because if there’s demand for workers and a chance of a better life, people will keep taking the risk. And criminal gangs will keep exploiting people’s desperation for money.

We desperately need to find a sustainable global way of living, without exploitation. But propagandists like the Telegraph prefer to keep people in rich nations distracted by scaremongering about people from poor nations.

To challenge that, every time we speak about immigration we need to centre the conversation on the small number of obscenely wealthy people who accumulate extreme levels of money as a direct or indirect result of the poverty or suffering of others. That is the system responsible for everything, and that needs to be our focus.

Featured image via the Canary