The UK debate on immigration has long been a failure of politics to examine the complex role immigration does and should play in our lives. To date it has seemed more like focus groups opining on the issue of rainfall.
“Hello. Today we’d like your views on UK rainfall. Show of hands, please…
“Who thinks … There’s too much rain? A bit too much? It’s about right? We need a lot more?
“Would you prefer our rain to come from… the far east? The deep south? The wild west? The near north?
“Should we prioritise rainwater for… Farming? Water sports? Window cleaning?
“Thanks. Always good to get a range of opinion. Obviously many of you think there’s too much rain, so we’ll adopt a policy to address that.”
Policy by public opinion
In contemporary politics the approach is to capture public opinions of a need so they can be catered for in policy. It’s closer to retail-marketing-meets-voter-anxiety than serious political leadership in formulating policy. Complex issues are often reduced to simplistic ones in the process.
Establishing accredited, factual, well-evidenced sources to inform the canvassed personal opinion does not feature. Instead, subjective opinions are often turned into stats and graphs that suggest scientific rigour and objectivity at work. All sides then take comfort in their opinion being endorsed by some ‘research finding’ or ‘polling’ that matches their world view. The result is compound ignorance.
Immigration calls for nuance and complexity. Where knowledge, expertise, truth and rigorous analysis are needed, there is a danger that these can be replaced with ideology and personal biases.
Successive governments have failed us over immigration by making the truth elusive
For decades, governments have failed to capture accurate immigration data on arrival or track the movement of immigrants during and at the end of their residency. Such data as has been collected historically, is based largely on sampling interviews with immigrants at airports, about their reasons for coming to live in the UK or for leaving. Arrivals data is improving and adjustments of government data from past collection periods are common. The latest data sets inevitably come with caveats about the dependability and comparability of the data collected over the long term.
Because we haven’t had adequate systems to give us a true picture of the UK’s immigration story, informed discussion of immigration has been difficult if not impossible. This context has led to a tendency to prioritise opinion over truth and bias over reality. For example, the prevailing public understanding of EU’s freedom of movement was that it was an uncontrollable, immigration free-for-all over which the UK had no control whatsoever. Yet we always had options for controlling migration when the UK was part of the EU – limiting immigration from new countries joining the EU, or returning immigrants who could not support themselves financially. The UK just never sought to implement those options.
Successive governments abdicated the control we had, and this has contributed to an environment of ignorance, enthusiastically exploited by the right-wing press and others to skew the national discourse. Immigration became the major issue on which the UK voted to leave the EU. Yet by 2023, net migration had increased to more than 906,000 from a pre-2016 level of 321,000, before it then fell to 728,000 in 2024. Arrivals from the EU have plummeted while non-EU immigration has ballooned.
For years politicians have not served the public well in the debate
Many elected politicians, and UKIP/Brexit/Reform Party Ltd leaders in particular, have regurgitated concerns about freedom of movement, so they claim, on the public’s behalf. MPs of all stripes have rarely been challenged by the media on their various assertions that immigration creates problems in many sectors of society.
They have rarely acknowledged the positive contribution to our society made by immigrants; or the qualified extent of welfare entitlements compared with the actual levels of abuse by immigrants; or discussed the minimal impact of immigration on wages. So ‘immigration’ has been left to fester as some toxic, unmediated problem. A basic attention to facts could have exposed the real problems, dispelled the false ones and raised the quality of the debate.
Information available on immigration before the EU referendum
There are many examples of information that could have shed light on the role of immigration before the pivotal Brexit referendum and ever since. For example, Full Fact in 2019, updated from 2016, reported:
- 83% of working-age EU citizens in the UK were in work compared to 76% for UK citizens and 66% for non-EU citizens.
- EU citizens in the UK – 58% come to take up a job or look for work, with 22% coming to study. Non-EU citizens in the UK – 53% come to study and 28% to work or look for it. All of them contribute to the economy as productive workers, taxpayers or fee-paying students.
Due to the demographic profile of the UK population, a shrinking number of active working people will be supporting a growing number of UK pensioners. This baby boomer bulge has been heading towards us for years. The widening gap is well known, but rarely are the implications in the context of immigration and state pension funding understood.
When it came to the EU referendum, immigration-related facts were widely misrepresented:
- A full explanation of the reciprocal nature of freedom of movement was lacking in the Brexit debate. In denying rights to immigrants from the EU we reduced opportunities for ourselves to travel, work study and live there.
- How the UK benefits from immigration through economic growth, education opportunities, shared scientific research and funding, cultural enrichment, soft power relationships and creative industries was woefully communicated. The UK’s traditionally successful music industry and other performing artists have been hit especially hard due to the increased burdens of performing in the EU imposed by the trade and cooperation agreement.
The distinction between different types of immigrant is now wilfully blurred (for example, those with jobs, those coming to study, those on special visa schemes like Ukrainian refugees) so immigration, in the minds of many, has become a blunt catch-all term that routinely fails to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants and refugees.
Public opinion on immigration is more nuanced than politicians claim
Independent polling carried out nationally by Focaldata for Best for Britain in January 2020 revealed that the majority of those polled supported ‘freedom of movement’ in reaching future trade deals with the EU, as long it as was reciprocated. Even in the ‘red wall’ regions of Yorkshire and Humberside, where nine seats switched from Labour to Conservative in 2019, the percentage of support across the range of responses was remarkably consistent across the 54 constituencies.
Yet there’s a political consensus that ‘the voter’s’ main concern is immigration, without much effort to explore or inform that view. A month before the survey, the 2019 general election result was proclaimed as clear evidence that the public was voting to leave the EU to put an end to freedom of movement.
During the pandemic, it was recognised how many vital roles are carried out by immigrants of all kinds in the functioning of the NHS and wider UK society. Yet that recognition has not been sustained in the post-pandemic, post Brexit era. While public opinion seems supportive of immigration in specific instances it remains opposed in a general sense. And this is particularly the case in rural areas, where people are the most vociferous in their objections to immigration, despite having the smallest proportion of immigrants. Conversely, support for immigration is high in London and other cities with a much greater proportion of immigrants living in them.
The national picture of an inverse relationship between a daily experience of immigration and opposition to it is not well explained by the data. Leaving this circle unsquared opens the field for misrepresentation by those politicians who benefit from or are threatened by populist views on immigration. The Financial Times recently confirmed this continuing gap between public opinion and reality.
The resolution
Time and again in the ‘UK debate on immigration’ we don’t have the necessary facts or fail to use the ones available. We are far from having a clear understanding, much less an agreement about where the national interest lies in managing immigration. The rush to cut the numbers at any cost has led, and could still lead, to short-sighted and self-defeating decisions. For instance, the government’s targets for home building call for over 60,000 more skilled builders than we currently have. The NHS is still understaffed by over 107,000 in secondary care. Limiting immigration by arbitrary numbers alone is counterproductive.
With the recurring evidence of nuanced and changing attitudes to immigration, and the prospect of difficult conditions ahead, the government could usefully pause and engage the public in thinking seriously about the reality of immigration and what our future national interests might be. An informed, engaged public would then be receptive to a government immigration policy that reflected our current circumstances, resulted in a shared public understanding of our genuine self-interests and reflected the UK’s humanitarian instincts. Why wouldn’t it do that?
