The government (if it hasn’t fallen yet) has found difficulty moving people onto Universal Credit from the benefits that they were receiving before. The process is called managed migration and the government refers to acts of migrating claimants.
This jargon sounds the more grotesque for the associations it provokes in the imagination: of migrants or asylum-seekers being herded into boats or cast into the Channel aboard inflatable craft.
Migrate had never been a transitive verb, as something that you do to people, except in the rarest cases. The Oxford English Dictionary found an example from 1768, from the pen of Abraham Tucker, a country gentleman who took to philosophy. In The Light of Nature Pursued, he wrote about the tendency for bigger creatures to move more slowly than smaller ones, and he imagined giants as big as Hampstead Hill.
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