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Immigration would seem like a strong policy issue for any party either left or right, the first wanting to have a more fair and egalitarian system, the latter wanting stricter controls over who is allowed entry. The truth is however that parliamentary parties rarely want to tackle the issue, being forced into reactionary and rhetoric fuelled policies that do more harm than good on the whole.

Christian Joppke discusses a certain understandable unawareness when it comes to issues like immigration for the average person with facts often hard to find. Statistics are used in such a way as to manipulate those reading them to the will of those presenting the information. That’s not to say the raw data is not available.

The official Home Office immigration detention figures show 436 children were detained last year in the UK, of these only 18 were in short term holding facilities. Meaning 418 children, 153 who were under five years old, were kept in long term holding facilities. Compare this to 2009 where the number is nearly 3 times higher (1,119) showing there has been a steep decline. The data shows a drop to zero for the number of child detainees for the years 2009 and 2010, or so the figures would appear to show. I don’t mean that the data is wrong, but it certainly is misleading and hard to follow.

This is precisely what Joppke was referring to when he said we could remain ignorant as a people and be justified in doing so. Why would you trawl through government websites to find obscure statistics and try to interpret them, to find out their true meaning?

The ‘facts’ we are given about the number of immigrants coming into the country are equally as hard to decipher in their original format. Depending on which paper you read, we are either living in a country being swamped, or one which has a shrinking population which is only being supported by workers coming from abroad. These same papers only have to give vague references to what these sources are, or to name a trusted individual, a person who is an authority on the subject and has access to the information and we are meant to take what they say, in both cases, as gospel.

This is the main problem I have with immigration specifically, we are meant to believe what other people tell us because it would mean too much of our own time and study to get the information from the source, even when this is made available to the public. Why not make the information itself more readily accessible? Why not let the general public be better informed about issues they are bombarded with in the press? Why not let us make up our own minds? An informed and educated public is a dangerous thing; the more we know, the less we believe.

Patrick Clover is a contributor at FutureLeft. He recently completed a Master’s in Political Theory from Cardiff University.