If this week marks the end of Brexit as a central issue in
British politics, as New York Times colleague Mark Landler suggested may have
happened, then it went out with a whimper, not a bang.
اضافة اعلان
On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der
Leyen, the president of the
European Commission, announced an agreement on
trade rules for Northern Ireland, resolving one of the last major
Brexit-related disputes between Britain and the European Union.
But while coverage in the British press was generally
positive, it had more of the sense of a dutiful news cycle than a genuine
watershed moment. That is consistent with voters’ generally blasé attitude
toward the Northern Ireland negotiations: A YouGov poll this week found that 44
percent of Britons were not following the issue at all, and only 6 percent
reported following it closely.
Brexit, as a political issue, was never really about trade for many Britons, but immigration. And that issue now plays a very different role in British politics than during the run-up to the 2016 referendum
On the one hand, this seems kind of shocking: Leaving the
European Union is the most significant political and economic event for Britain
in a generation. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis. People are
not even paying attention?
But Brexit, as a political issue, was never really about
trade for many Britons, but immigration. And that issue now plays a very
different role in British politics than during the run-up to the 2016
referendum — a shift that can tell us something about how fear of immigration
gathers steam as a political issue, and when it loses it.
A focus on taking controlImmigration was not the only issue for voters in the Brexit
contest, but it was a primary focus of the “Vote Leave” campaign ahead of the
2016 referendum.
In particular, Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK
Independence Party, or UKIP, hammered claims that EU membership meant
overwhelming, uncontrolled immigration. Notoriously, his campaign ran a poster
that showed a large crowd of mostly nonwhite immigrants with a slogan saying
that the country was at a “breaking point”, and exhorting voters to “break free
of the EU and take back control”.
That is a powerful message. When I was reporting on the rise
of populism in Europe in 2016 and 2017, Immo Fritsche, a professor at the
University of Leipzig in
Germany who studies group identity formation, told me
that when people feel a loss of control — such as from a sense that borders are
open and immigration has no limits — they cling more closely to racial and
national identities. And they desire leaders who promise to reassert control.
Those tendencies are easy pickings for populist politicians
like Farage, who claimed that Brexit was a way for Britain to wrest control of
its borders from the European Union.
According to a long-running Ipsos survey, in 2015, 81 percent of “leave” voters wanted immigration to be reduced. Now, only 64 percent of them do.
The appeal to fears of uncontrolled immigration worked. In
the week before the 2016 referendum, polling found that immigration was voters’
most important issue, ultimately powering “leave” to a slim victory.
By contrast, the remain camp, which focused on economic
arguments for staying in the
EU, struggled to convince voters that Brexit would
have a personal or economic effect on their lives, Gideon Skinner, the head of
political research for Ipsos, a polling firm, wrote shortly before the
referendum.
Losing political potencyNow, however, immigration is a far less potent political
issue, even among those who voted to leave.
According to a long-running Ipsos survey, in 2015, 81
percent of “leave” voters wanted immigration to be reduced. Now, only 64
percent of them do. And overall support for increased immigration is now the
highest the survey has ever measured. The World Values Survey, a long-running
academic study, found that in 2022 58 percent of Britons thought that the
government should let anyone into the country as long as there were jobs
available, with a further 10 percent saying there should not be any
restrictions.
That is all the more remarkable because immigration numbers
are actually much higher now than when Britain left the European Union in 2020.
Net migration (the number of immigrants arriving, minus the number of people
who left the country) has been especially high in the past year because of
people arriving from
Ukraine and Hong Kong under special visa programs.
There are some political reasons why that has not provoked a
backlash. As I have written in the past, Ukrainians have a lot of public
support because of a sense that Russia is a shared threat, and that helping
Ukrainian refugees helps the Ukrainian war effort.
But the bigger difference seems to be that the era of free
(and therefore uncontrolled-seeming) European
immigration ended when Britain
left the European Union in 2020. Ukrainian refugees and people fleeing China’s
security crackdown in Hong Kong have had access to special visa programs that
allow them to enter the country via normal channels. Only a tiny fraction of
migrants arrive without prior permission, and nearly all of those apply for
asylum.
The special visa for people fleeing Hong Kong is an
interesting example. Stephanie Schwartz, a political scientist at the London
School of Economics who studies the politics of immigration, noted a striking
lack of criticism or even public attention to that program, even though the
government estimated that as many as 300,000 people would be able to apply.
“If we’re looking at the way that the narrative of immigration and migration is being used, we’re dialing down, we’re silencing the conversation on labor and its relationship to a lot of things domestically that the population is upset about.”
As with Ukraine, political attitudes likely played a role.
Farage, for instance, has been particularly critical of the Chinese
government’s actions. But it may also be because the government decided to
process those applications via a special visa program rather than the political
asylum process, Schwartz said, even though most people leaving
Hong Kong as a
result of the crackdown there would probably have had strong claims for asylum.
“They are not being labeled asylum-seekers, and that is to
their advantage,” Schwartz said.
And at the same time that those structures make immigration
less potent as a political issue, other issues make it more likely to be an
uncomfortable one for the government. A recent report by the Nuffield Trust, a
health think tank, found that leaving the EU had cost Britain’s National Health
Service thousands of doctors and other health workers, contributing to critical
staffing shortages and the overall crisis in the British health system.
The exception to the government’s general quiet on
immigration is the one area involving many of the most vulnerable migrants, but
in which it is still possible to connect to voters’ sense of lost control:
asylum policy.
People seeking
asylum in Britain usually have to arrive
without a visa, because there is no way to initiate that process from outside
the country.
“If we’re looking at the way that the narrative of
immigration and migration is being used, we’re dialing down, we’re silencing
the conversation on labor and its relationship to a lot of things domestically
that the population is upset about,” Schwartz said. “And we’re instead seeing
the narrative focus on the ‘illegality’ of a certain form of migration.”
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