Could there really be the equivalent of 90 secondary schools worth of Vietnamese migrants unaccounted for? And are they all manicurists?
An article in The Sunday Times magazine about manicurists was picked up by Comment is Free yesterday in an article titled "Nail bars: modern-day slavery in plain sight". In it, Holly Baxter cited numbers originally reported by The Sunday Times article (paywalled link) which said:
Two of the biggest nail product suppliers in Britain estimate there are 100,000 Vietnamese manicurists working in 15,000 nail salons across the country. Yet census data states that only 29,000 Vietnamese-born migrants officially live in the UK.
Our commenters were quick to flag up that the numbers seemed inaccurate.
So, was The Sunday Times right to report this number and were we right to use it?
100,000 Vietnamese manicurists
This figure is based on a pretty routine journalistic practice that should always be avoided at all costs. In the absence of other sources, The Sunday Times quoted estimates from undisclosed private organisations.
Without providing their names, it is difficult for us to ask the sources for confirmation of their numbers. Even if we did, those manufacturers are ill-positioned to know the staffing levels of the companies they supply to - much less the nationalities of those staff.
29,000 Vietnamese migrants
Given that the UK census is a far more robust source of data, their claim "census data states that only 29,000 Vietnamese-born migrants officially live in the UK" seems a much better starting point. From there we might work out the number of Vietnamese immigrants that are likely to be unaccounted for - and then to work out the likely proportion of them that are manicurists.
But the latest ONS data did not include Vietnam in it's list of the 60 most common nationalities now resident in the UK. That list stretched from 545,000 Polish nationals to 13,000 Colombians - so the omission of Vietnam would suggest that the 29,000 figure is incorrect. We're still trying to check that.
Even if that figure were accurate, at the least, The Sunday Times article currently implies that there are 71,000 hidden Vietnamese nationals in the UK and that every Vietnamese migrant, hidden or not is a manicurist. At the most, it implies that there are hundreds of thousands of illegal Vietnamese nationals in the UK.
But there's another source which is more reliable than a nail-product supplier for working out how many Vietnamese immigrants there are - the UK Border Agency. We've dug up their latest statistics on the number of Vietnamese nationals that applied for, and were subsequently refused a visa.
They show that in the eight years between the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of this year, 81,886 Vietnamese nationals applied for a UK visa - and almost 73,000 of those visas were subsequently issued. The reason for the huge gap between that and the 29,000 figure is that a successful visa application does not equate to becoming a UK resident. What's more, some would have entered prior to 2005.
In fact, a tiny proportion of those applications are for work permits - just 77 (or 0.6%) of the 13,000 visa applications from Vietnamese nationals in 2012 asked to work in the country. Can we assume that all the other immigrants lied, and subsequently remained in the country?
Probably not. Many probably came for tourism or to visit friends and family over here. Although we can't say what proportion did so, that's no reason to assume that none did.
Scale of human trafficking in the UK
More problematically, the Comment is Free article leapt from talking about illegal immigrants to victims of human trafficking and in doing so, seemed to conflate these two, very different groups.
But again, there are more reliable sources for understanding the scale of human trafficking to the UK. Since 2009, the UK has had a National Referral Mechanism (NRM) in place to "identify individuals who may be potential victims of trafficking".
According to the latest statistics from January to March 2013, it is true that Vietnam is one of the top countries of concern, having the highest number of NRM cases after Albania, Nigeria and Poland. While even one case of human trafficking is one too many, the raw numbers do cast doubt on the implication that there are thousands of Vietnamese victims in the UK - 32 Vietnamese nationals were identified as potential victims in those three months.
Scale of modern slavery in the UK
Another claim, made quite explicitly in the title and throughout the article, was that many of these Vietnamese nationals are "modern-day slaves". A report by the Center for Social Justice in March this year suggested that there were around 850 adults and 380 children in modern-day slavery - around a quarter of whom are victims of labour exploitation.
In 2011, around 25 of the cases they documented were Vietnamese nationals. Though they acknowledge that the known figures are a small fraction of the true scale of human trafficking, it is unlikely that they represent just 0.025% of the problem.
The fact is, like any illicit activity, illegal immigration is extremely hard to measure. But that should not be an excuse for using spurious sources such as private companies or conflating separate notions such as immigration, human trafficking and slavery.
It is possible that The Sunday Times' figures are accurate. But we would suggest treating them with a dose of skepticism.
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Immigration and asylum
Mona Chalabi
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