related to this I saw a report about the EU voting where some campaign group identifed that from 2004-2014 there were 475 000 live births in the UK to mothers of foreign nationalities.
These figures are collected by the hospitals and published by the NHS/Office of National Statistics (every other country in the world does the same) – they get auditeed by the EU (or other equivalent organisations such as ASEAN) and the UN for planning healthcare and education requirements.
By law a child resident in the UK must attend formal education starting from age 5 (this is a much lower age than elsewhere in Europe), so around half these kids would be likely to have reached school age.
Yet in the last 5 years I have read many reports about schools (in particular junior schools) being merged or closed down altogether in many parts of Britain due to a lack of children to fill them, low birth rates and the population particularly outside cities getting older – which does indeed suggest these the families (or at least the mothers and children) are removing the children from the UK to their home nations or perhaps elsewhere in Europe with better standards of childcare and education.
The current kerfuffle over migration is overshadowing a wider problem of a global baby shortage; especially in Europe and the Asian countries (it is no coincidence that China has recently abandoned the one child per family policy and other Asian nations have stopped enforcing the death penalty for minor drugs offences). However wars in the Middle East, economic problems and the not unrelated loss of 4 (or 5?) full passenger aircrafts through either deliberate actions or neglect (or in some cases both) has not helped things one bit; whole families and young people of child bearing age from well educated multicultural communities have perished in these crashes.
I’ve recently been watching a German educational TV programme aimed at children (though popular with all ages) called “Die Sendung mit der Maus” – this year they follow the progress of a refugee family who have settled in Germany. The focus is on a young girl around age 9/10 (the target age for the TV show; and about as far as my German stretches) although she has two sisters and a younger brother. This week they showed how they queue up and register for the visas; and what school is like for the younger people. The young lass’s German is probably better than mine; and her older sister who a few months ago was having extra tuition has now gone to Gymnasium which in Northern Europe is not just a place for sports but an entire high school for the more intelligent youngsters.
This is of course positive for this family, Germany and Europe but sadly a lot of business ownera and politicians use the spirit and work ethic of the refugees to set them up in competition with the locals for jobs (sometimes they don’t even really want to do that but economic pressures from outside force it upon them). It is this ruthless competition (not the concept of migration by itself) which causes a great deal of all the trouble in the world.
