Leavers’ immigration hopes will be betrayed
March 4 2019, 12:01am,
Clare Foges
The rise in migration from outside the EU shows that the government is not listening to what the British people want
Pull on your walking boots, pack your ginger beer and pay your modest £50 joining fee: later this month Nigel Farage begins a March For Leave protest from Sunderland to Westminster. Cries of “God speed, Nige!” in Hartlepool; blisters tended to in Doncaster; a Blitz-style singalong in Wellingborough. The purpose of Farage’s march? “To tell the Westminster elite we will not be betrayed over Brexit.”
Ah, the B-word. Betrayal. Expect to hear it endlessly over the coming months. Whatever form of Brexit we end up with, Brexiteers will say it betrays the Brexit dream, Remainers that it betrays the British people, young people that it betrays their hopes of a bright future.
In the years to come we also face another mighty wave of betrayed anger: the rage of Leave voters who thought Brexit would cut immigration. Some who campaigned for Leave would rather that the referendum was all about sovereignty (which they consider a high-flown and principled reason) rather than immigration (which they think base and a little racist). Consider Boris Johnson’s recent rather weaselly remarks that he “didn’t say anything about Turkey during the referendum”, despite his multiple mentions of possible Turkish accession to the EU, the letter he wrote to David Cameron in June 2016 saying that “the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote leave”, the poster run by his campaign stating that “Turkey (76 million people) is joining the EU”.
Johnson — and Vote Leave — knew full well that voters’ frustration over high levels of immigration was political dynamite. Year after year, when people were asked about the most important issues facing the country, immigration came at or near the top of the list, while Europe barely registered. They were not talking about the perils of “ever-closer union” in the Dog and Duck. The overwhelming public anxiety was about immigration. So when voters were told they could “take back control”, they foresaw a significant fall in numbers.
This is why public opinion on immigration has softened so dramatically since the vote. In June 2016 YouGov found that 56 per cent of people named “immigration and asylum” as one of the top issues facing the country. By last month the figure had tumbled to 27 per cent. What happened? Have all those concerns about mass immigration and its impact on housing and infrastructure just melted away? No. Concern about immigration has softened because people believe Brexit will cut immigration significantly. They trust that the issue is in hand, that numbers are bound to fall.
But figures released last week gave us a clear indication that overall numbers will not fall. While net immigration from the EU has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, net migration from outside the bloc is at its highest since 2004, with 261,000 more non-EU citizens arriving than leaving in the year to September 2018. The Poles and Romanians are simply being replaced by migrants from outside Europe.
Register the significance of this. Non-EU migration is the part that the government has always been able to control. No need to “take back control” of our borders here, we already have it. And yet successive governments have been unwilling or unable to bring the numbers down. Indeed, it seems likely that the non-EU figure will climb farther after Brexit, with visas to the UK used as sweeteners to secure free trade deals. This is not to mention the pressure from business to maintain the flow of low-skilled workers into the UK, wherever they may come from.
So not only does it seem likely that net migration numbers will remain extremely high, it looks as though a higher proportion will come from outside the EU than inside it. This matters for two reasons.
First, financial. Go beyond the stereotypes of feckless Romanians and you find that migrants from the European Economic Area are far more likely to make a net contribution to the UK’s coffers than those from outside it. Last year a report by the Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the government, contained some surprising figures.
The average adult migrant from EU countries contributed about £2,300 more to the UK public finances than the average British adult. The average non-EU migrant contributed about £840 less than the average Briton. This difference is partly explained by the fact that many non-EU citizens bring family dependents with them who do no work. In 2016 nearly a quarter of those who migrated from outside the EU (53,000 people) came to join members of their family.
The second reason is cultural. As uncomfortable as it may be to say, those from outside the EU are more likely to come from countries whose way of life and beliefs differ from British culture in a problematic way; whose attitudes to women, sexuality and secular freedoms jar with our own. Across swathes of Asia, the Middle East and Africa there prevail attitudes that we rightly condemn as backward and misogynistic. Partly as a consequence of this conflict, some who have migrated to the UK from outside the EU have formed communities that turn their backs on mainstream British culture, preferring isolation to integration.
I would suggest that it is for these reasons, rather than bigotry, that the British public show a preference for EU migration over that from outside Europe. In 2017 the London School of Economics conducted a survey of British residents, asking respondents to indicate their preferred level of net immigration from each group, on a sliding scale from zero to 165,000 a year. Middle-class people, the young and Remainers preferred more net immigration overall than the working class, older people and Leavers, but across social classes and ages, across both sides of the referendum divide, all groups indicated that they would prefer more immigrants from the EU than from outside it.
This is not to say that we should close the door on talent beyond Europe’s borders: far from it. Britain needs the skills, energy, kindness and wisdom of people from across the world. But any government purporting to care about “the will of the people” must take the clear views of those people into account. If these views are ignored, and if the overall numbers do not fall, then in this case the word “betrayal” will be well deserved.
@ClareFoges
