Talk:Foreign-born population of the United Kingdom

Population
The 54,215,000 for the UK Population is wrong, this figure is for England and Wales only. There are currently over 51 million people in England and a further 3 million in Wales. The population of Scotland is over 5 million and the population of Northern Ireland is around 1.8 million. The latest figures given for the United Kingdom Population are around 62 million. Your figure of 54.2 million for the UK is therefore not just wrong it contradicts most of the figures given on other wikipedia pages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England

fitting the page
While this page provides a lot of useful facts and statistics, it seems a bit in Limbo and could be better placed as part of a larger article. There isn't a page called Foreign-born population of Great Britain. Perhaps that could be created and this page incorporated into that. That would also serve to provide more context. Maybe it could be called Population of UK born abroad?

Athosfolk 18:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Done. Cordless Larry (talk) 12:20, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Total population column
The "total population" column in the table is highly problematic. The parameters of the figures given in it vary by entry. Some represent the population including descendents, some are just for those people born in the given country, and they all come from different sources. I think that this arguably breaches WP:OR and should be removed. If there are no reasonable objections, I will do so shortly. Cordless Larry (talk) 00:08, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I've now replaced the estimates with estimates from a single source - the Office for National Statistics. Cordless Larry (talk) 22:22, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I am proposing that we merge African migration to the United Kingdom, Migration to the United Kingdom from the Americas and Migration to the United Kingdom from Asia into this page.

These articles bring little to Wikipedia. At the moment, they only contain country-of-birth population figures and links to individual country-of-birth articles. This function is already played by the Foreign-born population of the United Kingdom article and numerous templates. These articles simply reproduce the same data table and list of links that already exist here. I'm of the view that it is better to work on improving this page and the individual country-of-birth articles rather than introducing yet another layer of article.

Take Brazilians in the UK as a group as an example. They feature in the articles Brazilians in the United Kingdom, Latin Americans in the United Kingdom, Migration to the United Kingdom from the Americas, and Foreign-born population of the United Kingdom. All of this is based on the same source material and I feel that we may be over-stretching when our efforts would be better employed improving on what we already have. Cordless Larry (talk) 09:18, 24 August 2009 (UTC)


 * In general I agree that these shouldn't all be separate pages --- it seems they've mainly been created due to the need for merge targets for articles about non-notable populations.


 * The one disadvantage I see is that the big table on this page can be hard to edit and maintain. One possible technical solution to this would be something like the system used for List of minor planets: you have individual subarticles like List of minor planets/6101–6200 which consist just of table rows and a noinclude'd hatnote stating "This page is not meant to be viewed alone". Then they're used by larger articles like List of minor planets: 6001–7000 which just consist of table headers and a bunch of transclusions. cab (talk) 04:53, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * That's a good point, although it's a problem regardless of the merger since the table won't get any longer as a result of it. I will have a think about your suggestion and other possible solutions. Cordless Larry (talk) 07:34, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Table length
Does anyone know whether it is possible to make a table, only part of which is collapsible? If it is, then it might be a good idea to have the table initially only show the top, say, twenty countries of birth, with the rest visible by expanding the full table. I can only find instructions for making the whole table collapsible though. Cordless Larry (talk) 08:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Percentage change
I reverted the addition of a percentage change column to the table for a number of reasons, the main one being that the 2001 figures are an exact count, whereas the 2008 figures are rounded estimates. The change figures given were also described as approximate, which is always worrying! The edit also caused some problems with cell alignment. If anyone wants to make a case for including a percentage change column, please do so here. Cordless Larry (talk) 14:10, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Foreigners?
This article does not distinguish between foreign-born people who are white British and born overseas just because their parents went abroad to work, versus people from elsewhere who emigrated to the UK. Are there any statistics on this? The first category would almost all be British citizens, whereas the second would include some citizens, some permanent residents who don't want to become citizens, some who are in the process of becoming citizens, some temporary residents and some illegals. Such information also belongs in this article. 219.73.48.124 (talk) 08:56, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
 * In principle, it would be good to differentiate between those born abroad to British parents and those who had no previous link with the UK, but there simply isn't data on that. There is data on foreign nationals in the UK, but obviously that wouldn't include people who were born abroad but are now naturalised citizens. Then there is the data used here, which includes everyone born abroad. Cordless Larry (talk) 08:59, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

this article also includes british territories which im sure aren't foreign as well as commonwealth countries whose citizens aren't considered foreign in the uk (see commonwealth citizen), maybe it should be retitled to population of the united kingdom born abroad.92.236.129.62 (talk) 11:30, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The definition of 'Foreign-born' should be based on that used by the the Office for National Statistics | see cite here

"'Country of birth cannot change over time (unlike nationality) and so those born outside the UK represent a stable definition of a migrant. It is a measure of ‘foreign-born’ people, but includes some people who were UK citizens at birth even though born abroad (for example, to parents working overseas in the Armed Forces). Additionally many usual residents of England and Wales born outside the UK will have subsequently become UK citizens.'" It might be worth seeing whether the article would be improved by making this clearer.Tmol42 (talk) 15:13, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

"..commonwealth countries whose citizens aren't considered foreign in the uk", no that is obviously wrong and a complete lie. Citizens of typical Commonwealth countries, such as Pakistan and Nigeria are definitely considered foreign in Britain, and this is not just legally, they are considered foreign by almost everyone who lives in Britain. Pakistanis, Nigerians and Papua New Guineans are foreign and that is really just an indisputable fact. It is also fact that, because we are presently in a political union within the European Union, it would be illogical and a lie to describe citizens from other EU regions as foreign, really they cannot rationally even be considered as immigrants. Britain's relationship with other EU regions is a reciprocal one, a fair one and a relationship born out of democracy and trust. We were never forced together by some oppressive and undemocratic empire. Britain also has a long shared history, almost identical culture and even very similar birth rates to all the other EU countries. We have so much in common with Europe, because we are basically European! Romania and Poland incidentally have lower birth rates than the UK, unlike Commonwealth countries like Nigeria where the birth rate is five times higher than the UK's. The European Union is our homeland, it is definitely not something foreign. Whereas in complete contrast, the Commonwealth countries, which lie thousands of miles away, mostly on the other side of the world, with countries like Papua New Guinea and even Mozambique, are something so completely and utterly foreign to us!

Adding Eu flags in the list
Hello I suggest adding EU flags in the list next to the country flags of European Union member states, as it's done in this list LGBT_rights_in_Europe. I think it's relevant to know as the UK is an EU state Darekkk (talk) 13:18, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Definitions
Some of the definitions here are unclear - maybe someone who knows the datasets better than I do could insert clarifications? As Oxford University's Migration Observatory notes, migration figures are often reliant on terms that are defined very differently by different data-users... 'Resident', for example, needs defining: does it mean 'normally resident' (probably what most people will assume) or does it include foreign students, au-pairs, young people doing gap years, and the like? (This has a significant impact on the data: there are almost half a million foreign students studying in the UK, for example, and I suspect they are included). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.188.210.40 (talk) 07:55, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Recent edits to Countries of origin table
A user has recently changed the latest estimates from the 2012 ONS figures to the 2015 UN figures. I would have thought it would be better to use the latest ONS figures from here as these are the official UK Government Figures.

Also the 2011 census figures should either replace the 2001 figures or added as a new column

80.41.66.13 (talk) 05:04, 27 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree that we should include the 2011 census figures, but they are published separately for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so it would take a bit of work to add them all up. ONS estimates would be better than the UN ones, although I think they cover fewer countries of birth (hence with less margin of error). Cordless Larry (talk) 12:32, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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More info
Could someone add the info from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/august2016 as well please?

It's for 2015. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:30A:2ED6:9470:CD35:CD4A:1D73:7332 (talk) 16:29, 12 May 2017 (UTC)