London’s children and young people who are not British citizens

A new report by Mayor of London outlines an updated estimate of the numbers of young Londoners who are foreign-born, or foreign nationals, and disaggregates the likely numbers who are undocumented and who are nationals of EEA+ countries. The report outlines which London boroughs have particular concentrations of children and young people from a migrant backgound and concludes with a discussion about how many have taken up the various regularisation pathways that are available to them.

Estimating the size of the undocumented population has been described as ‘counting the uncountable’ (Kelly, 1977), and any estimate relies on informed guesswork and reasonable assumptions. Although official data are available for the foreign-born population in the UK, there are no official data on the size of the undocumented population in the UK or in London; so different data sources must be used to construct an estimate and must therefore be used with caution. The report draws on data from a range of sources, including the 2011 census, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and International Passenger Survey (IPS) to estimate the numbers of migrants in London, and the UK as a whole. An estimate for the numbers of undocumented children (under 18) and young people (18-25) is calculated using the residual method (Woodbridge, 2005), which subtracts the total number of regularised migrants from the total foreign-born population to reach a de facto figure of the likely numbers of undocumented individuals

The report can be downloaded from here 

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