ABSTRACT
Discourses on irregular migration have changed substantially in past decades. Discourse elements such as security and threat became increasingly dominant. These elements always existed, but by the emerging forces of globalization and terrorism, these elements became somewhat intensified. The numbers game' of the growth rate of Britain's black communities in the early 1980s became a numbers game' of asylum or so-called bogus' asylum seekers in the beginning of the 1990s and shifted to a numbers game' of irregular migrants in the late 1990s. Traditionally, the United Kingdom was regarded as a country of emigration and the need for a systematic recording system was not seen as urgent. There exists a variety of data sets, while the most relevant concerning international migration records are: International Passenger Survey (IPS), the 2001 Population Census, annual Control of Immigration: Statistics UK', Labour Force Survey (LFS) as well as the statistics from the Department of Social Security and the National Health Service (NHS).
