FactCheck: will Muslim women be deported if they don’t learn English?

FactCheck: will Muslim women be deported if they don’t learn English?

January 18, 2016 

“Muslim women must learn English or risk deportation”.

That was a typical headline today after the Prime Minister announced a £20m fund for English lessons for “isolated” women and a new language test for some immigrants.

Mr Cameron said there were 190,000 women in the UK with little or no English. The government wants Muslim brides who apply for permission to stay with their husbands in Britain to face tougher language tests.

In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, he appeared to suggest that even women who have children after coming to the UK might be forced to leave if they don’t improve their English.

Do Muslim women struggle with English?

The PM said 190,000 Muslim women – 22 per cent of the population – had little or no English.

This number comes from the Office for National Statistics and can be found by clicking on the fifth table in this list.

The figures – based on the 2011 census – show that nearly 152,000 English Muslim women and girls aged 16 and over “cannot speak English well” and another 38,000 “cannot speak English”. That is indeed about 22 per cent of Muslim female over-16s recorded in the census.

The percentage for women who gave their religion as Hindu was just under 13 per cent, although that may not be a useful comparison – the average Hindu woman might have been living here for longer, be better educated, or have started out with more English.

We would really want to know how Muslim women’s English skills compare to women with similar backgrounds and profiles who follow different religions, but we don’t have a control group to hand.

We don’t know from these figures how many Muslim women with poor English are recent arrivals, or how likely Muslim women are to improve their language skills over time compared to other groups.

The figures don’t prove or disprove Mr Cameron’s claim that many Muslim woman speak “little or no English despite many having lived here for decades”.

Is there a link between language proficiency and extremism?

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