“Over half of the estimated 120,000 undocumented migrant children in the UK were born here. Many have lived here for their entire childhood,” Kamena Dorling, policy and programmes manager at the centre said.

Children ‘trapped in British limbo’

Undocumented European immigration in numbers. 

I’ve written about the language of European immigration before and how there is an institutional push to classify undocumented immigrants as either refugees or asylum seekers, erasing the multiplicity of experiences that lead to migration and displacement. Another erasure that is quite common across the EU has to do with figures. There is no data collection as to the number of undocumented migrants currently living within the European Union. I suspect that this lack of data, paired with the above mentioned language misuse is a purely political decision. In order to perpetuate the myth of “European human rights champion”, the EU needs to obscure the realities of those that are disenfranchised within its own borders. 


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