How we write about this
Some of our wording rules are statistical precision. Others are choices about values. This page says which is which, because presenting the second kind as the first would be the thing we criticise in others.
Migration statistics come wrapped in contested vocabulary. A site that corrects other people's language owes an account of its own.
Rules that are precision
These are not matters of taste. Getting them wrong makes a sentence factually wrong.
| Instead of | We write | Because |
|---|---|---|
| "Immigration is X" | Net migration / visa grants / asylum applications is X | Naming the measured quantity is the difference between a fact and a category error |
| "The backlog" | The initial decision backlog / the appeals backlog / total casework | There are several queues, of different sizes, moving in different directions |
| "Asylum seekers entered illegally" | People who claimed asylum after arriving by an irregular route | Route of arrival and claim status are separate facts, and one does not determine the other |
| A figure with no period | The figure with its period and basis attached | Without those, a number on this subject carries no information |
Rules that are choices
These are defensible, and they are still choices. We would rather say so than imply that everyone reasonable agrees.
We write "irregular arrival" rather than "illegal migrant" by default. The phrase we avoid is legally imprecise, arriving without prior permission is not in itself what makes a person's presence unlawful, and a claim's outcome is decided separately. But it is also true that our preferred phrasing is the one favoured by people who are broadly sympathetic to migrants, and that some readers will hear the softer term as taking a side. That is a fair observation and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
We avoid "flooding", "swamping" and similar. This is a judgement that metaphors drawn from natural disasters describe people badly. It is not a statistical rule.
We describe people as people. The site publishes what the asylum system spends. It does not publish a cost per asylum seeker, because dividing a system's running costs by the number of people in it produces a figure that reads as a person's value.
Where our sources use different words
We quote source titles exactly as published, including the words we would not choose.
The Home Office dataset behind our irregular-arrival figures was titled "Irregular migration to the UK detailed dataset (illegal entry routes)" and was renamed "Illegal entry routes to the UK detailed dataset" from the year ending December 2025 edition. We cite whichever title the edition we used actually carries.
Renaming a source quietly would be concealment, and a reader who followed the link would be right to distrust everything else on the page.
The labels on our claim checks
Each claim check is tagged with a direction: restrictionist for claims that overstate the scale or cost of migration, and pro-migration for claims that overstate its benefits or understate its difficulties. Those are the only two labels in use. A misuse common on both sides is written up under whichever version circulates more, and carries that side's label. There is no shared label: one was described here until 6 August 2026 and no claim ever carried it, which is a promise to a reader that nothing kept.
These labels describe the claim, not the person making it, and they are ours rather than anybody's self-description. "Restrictionist" in particular is not a word most people who make those claims would use about themselves. We use it because "anti-immigration" is worse and because we need a consistent handle, not because it is neutral. If you have a better pair, we would genuinely like to hear it.
What we do not do
We do not attribute claims to named people. Our claim checks describe propositions that circulate, not quotations. That avoids litigating individuals and it carries a real cost: the "nobody actually says that" rebuttal. We accept the trade and would revisit it if that rebuttal became the main criticism of the site.
We do not correct claims about what policy should be. That is a question about values, and this site has no standing to answer it.
This page was last reviewed on .