Incendiary warnings from politicians. Sharp moods in parliament. A looming election against a backdrop of a national crisis. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party has been embroiled in a vociferous debate over the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, which at times has sounded like a not-so-distant echo of Brexit.

But for all the anger it has caused, the Rwanda plan is little more than an afterthought in the surprising story of post-Brexit immigration in Britain. Although refugees making the perilous crossing of the Channel in rickety boats pose a humanitarian challenge, they make up a fraction – less than 5 percent – ​​of the number of people who legally immigrate to the country each year.

Rather than closing its borders, Britain has thrown them open since voting to leave the European Union in 2016. And as the coronavirus pandemic has subsided, legal immigration has exploded. Net legal migration – the number of people who arrived minus those who left – was almost 750,000 people in 2022. That is more than double the number in the year before the Brexit referendum.

Immigration is replenishing Britain’s workforce and deepening the diversity of its cities – a deliberate, if largely unspoken, strategy that has come as a rude shock to people who voted for Brexit on the promise of making the country’s borders less porous would make. And that has made it a volatile political issue for the Conservative Party, which played on fears of a foreign influx to propel the Brexit campaign but ended up presiding over a new era of massive legal migration.

“The Brexit betrayal is now complete,” he said a headline in The Daily Telegrapha generally pro-Tory newspaper, after the latest figures were released.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said “there is a kind of left-right issue” with immigration. The government’s boisterous message – Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently warned that migrants could “overwhelm” the country – is often belied by its actions, she said, most visibly in the core Brexit trade-off: while Britain cuts immigration ahead of EU -citizens were reduced, immigration for EU citizens was relaxed. restrictions for people coming from many other parts of the world.

There were also important one-off increases in the figures. Britain has hosted around 174,000 refugees from Ukraine and around 125,000 British overseas passport holders from Hong Kong, who were granted residency after China imposed a draconian national security law on the former British colony.

But even discounting these effects, and other recent policy changes that are expected to reduce legal immigration rates over time, Britain has become an indisputably more ethnically and racially diverse country than before Brexit.

What has changed are the types of migrants who are granted visas. Fewer young people from Italy and Spain are working as waiters in London restaurants, and more medical professionals from India and the Philippines are working as doctors and nurses in Britain’s understaffed National Health Service. There are fewer Polish plumbers and more Nigerian students.

That shift is by design: Brexiteers promised that if Britain broke away from the European Union, it could devise policies that would attract the best and brightest from around the world. When the post-Brexit immigration system came into effect in January 2021, the previous cap on visas for skilled workers was abolished, as was the requirement for employers to prove that jobs could not be done by British residents.

Predictably, the number of arrivals increased. In 2013, 33,000 people emigrated from India to Britain. Ten years later the time had almost come eight times that numberat 253,000.

This new wave of migrants in the British economy is so important that some experts argue that immigration policy should be seen as an unexpected dividend from Brexit. The newcomers keep hospitals and nursing homes running and pay for the maintenance of British universities that lack tuition fees.

“To give credit to at least one section of the Brexiteers, their promise was to have a system that was non-discriminatory, based on skills and salaries,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London. “It’s a lot closer to delivering on the promise of Brexit than anything else they’ve done.”

And yet it is a success that is almost taboo for Mr Sunak. He was one of the early supporters of Brexit, which was sold as a lever to regain control of Britain’s borders. As far as immigration goes, he has repeatedly vowed to ‘stop the boats’ crossing the Channel – so far he has failed to do so.

“If we don’t tackle this problem, the numbers will only increase,” Mr Sunak told a recent conference in Rome organized by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party. “It will overwhelm our countries and our ability to help those who need our help most.”

Critics in Britain compared Sunak’s language to that of Suella Braverman, a far-right Tory who served as home secretary before sacking her last month in an internal dispute. Ms Braverman, whose parents emigrated from Kenya and Mauritius, once warned of a “hurricane” of mass migration, calling asylum seekers landing on England’s south coast an “invasion”.

Mr Sunak is himself the son of immigrants of Indian descent, who moved to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s. “They came here because the British government decided they wanted to come here,” he said last year.

Analysts say his populist language is aimed at a section of disaffected Conservative voters, who delivered the party’s 2019 victory largely on its promise to “get Brexit done”, and for whom immigration remains a galvanizing issue . The Rwanda policy, these analysts say, gives the government, which is trailing the opposition Labor party in the polls, cover for its more pragmatic approach to legal immigration.

“Much of the pro-Brexit coalition is still anti-immigration, nationalist, quite nativist and even racist,” Professor Portes said. “Part of the reason we are so tough on Rwanda is because we have a relatively liberal strategy on economic migration.”

Since the latest migration statistics were published, the government has been under pressure to reduce legal numbers. The Interior Ministry said this month it will reduce the number of family members skilled workers can bring with them by raising the minimum wages they must earn to get a visa. These measures are estimated to make about 300,000 people who applied last year no longer eligible, although the government slightly watered down the policy on Thursday.

“Leaving the European Union has given us control over who can come to Britain, but much more needs to be done to reduce that number so that British workers are not undermined and our public services are put under less pressure. stand,” said James Cleverly. Mr Sunak has been appointed to replace Ms Braverman.

The Migration Advisory Committee, an independent panel that advises the government, said there are reasons to expect a “significant decline” in numbers in coming years. But it said immigration would not fall to very low numbers without other major policy changes.

For example, British doctors and nurses are fleeing the NHS, which is struggling to recruit homegrown replacements due to low pay and grueling working conditions. The committee called for better wages and said that “we remain deeply disappointed that the UK government continues to show no ambition in this area.”

Mr Sunak has not set a target for net migration, which experts said was sensible as a former Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, was dogged by his promise to reduce the number of new arrivals to “tens of thousands”.

It is not even clear what the optimal level of legal immigration should be. That’s a complex political and economic calculation involving long-term demographic trends, questions of population density and issues of social cohesion. It is irritating Western countries including France, which just passed a tough new immigration law, and the United States, where the southern border will play a major role in the 2024 presidential race.

In Britain, images of refugees landing on beaches in unseaworthy boats are posted on social media by Nigel Farage, a populist politician and broadcaster who made immigration an emotional issue before the Brexit vote. His new party, Reform UK, an offspring of the Brexit party, threatens to siphon votes from the Tories.

One of the mysteries of the current immigration debate, however, is why the wider population remains relatively relaxed about the record numbers, while people were much more hostile a decade ago. It may reflect a recognition that Britain is facing a labor shortage, which would be even more acute without the new arrivals.

Another explanation, experts say, is that the migrants are moving to larger cities, where hospitals and universities are located. These destinations are already more diverse than cities and towns, where the influx of outsiders was more noticeable ten years ago, for example fruit and vegetable pickers from Eastern Europe.

“People notice it in emergency rooms, but they don’t mind because they know the NHS is in crisis,” said Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester. “When you see highly qualified professionals who are not white, it’s very different if you had unskilled migrants from Poland or Romania who moved to the countryside and didn’t speak English.”

Intense coverage of the Rwanda policy – ​​and the divisions it has exposed among conservative lawmakers – has made people somewhat more concerned about immigration, recent polls show.

But the issue still lags behind kitchen table problems such as the cost of living, and roughly even the shaky state of the UK’s healthcare system. And it comes after several years of steadily improving public attitudes towards immigration. Even now, pollsters say, Britons view the role of immigration more positively than before Brexit.

“The salience of immigration has increased,” said Professor Ford, “but it has increased almost entirely in one political group: existing Tory voters.”

Saskia Salomon reporting contributed.

A self-taught artist-cartographer and outdoorsman spent three years on an obsessive labor of love with few parallels.

December 10, 2023

In July 2020, his universe shrunk to a two-bedroom apartment on a rattling train line. Anton Thomas got one H pencil and opened a portal to the world.

His days of solitude were immediately filled with New Zealand’s native birds; dolphins, turtles and whales bouncing around; and polar bears on ice floes. Three years, approximately 2,602 working hours and 1,642 animal species later, ‘Wild World’ a hand-drawn map of our planet that both inspires and celebrates wonder.

Mr. Thomas, an exuberant New Zealander living in Melbourne, Australia, initially expected to spend less than a year on the project. But as the months passed and he sank deeper into the “possibility of spiritual escape and not going crazy,” he said, the scope of the task expanded. It was sometimes quite a task to drag herself away at the end of the day.

As a hiker and outdoorsman, Mr. Thomas longed as a child for a world where nature predominated. His card represents the “idealistic planet I wanted,” Thomas, 34, said. “I looked out at Wellington Harbour,” in New Zealand’s capital, “and saw all the houses, and imagined what it was like before people showed up.”

To create each creature with sufficient detail, he usually drew under a magnifying glass, using sandpaper to sculpt his pencil ends into fussy points.

Almost as time-consuming was the research that guided his hand. Should a South Atlantic archipelago be written as the Falkland Islands or Las Malvinas? Did it matter that the thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger, is probably extinct? Was a fighting bull Spain’s most iconic animal?

Therefore, Mr. Thomas set guidelines for himself. Animals must be native to their location and not domesticated or extinct. The names of places should, where possible, be those preferred by their inhabitants. Man-made boundaries are non-existent. (In practice this meant that both names appeared; the thylacine did not; and a Cantabrian brown bear replaced the toro.)

Used the card a natural earth projectionand the center passes through 11 degrees east of the Greenwich Meridian, just past Oslo, partly to give New Zealand and Fiji a more harmonious placement.

Despite his commitment to ‘neutrality’, Mr Thomas acknowledges that any inclusion or omission will provoke debate. “Anyway,” he said, “you have a conversation.”

Mr. Thomas spent his early years in Nelson, a small port city in New Zealand. For him, the mountains and rivers were a paradise that far eclipsed the fantasy world of children’s books or video games.

The son of an artist, from his earliest childhood he had no formal training other than drawing maps, some of which are also illustrated with cheerful animal life. Then as now, he said, he understood cartography simply as representational drawing at a distance.

Illustrated maps like Mr. Thomas’s are powerful in part because they mimic how the human brain perceives the world, says John Roman, an artist-cartographer in Boston and author of “The Art of Illustrated Maps.”

“We don’t see the latitude and longitude lines on maps,” he said. “We see the world, in our heads, through icons.”

For Mr. Thomas, this amounts to a kind of “emotional geography,” where features with greater emotional weight — the New York City skyline or the Golden Gate Bridge, for example — can take up more space.

“There are animals the size of mountain ranges on my map,” he said. “But you know what? If we want to draw an emotional map, the African lion should tower over Kilimanjaro.”

Almost as special as Mr. Thomas’s maps, says Tom Patterson, a retired cartographer for the National Park Service, is the way he explains them. “His enthusiasm for his work just shines through,” he said.

Mr. Thomas did not set out to become an artist-cartographer. After high school, he worked in the kitchen of a politically themed pub in Wellington, while working as a gigging musician.

At 21, dreaming of rock stardom, he left his homeland for two years of “high jinks” in North America.

The music career did not progress. But the continent’s stunning topography “supercharged” his passion for geography as a child, he said, and he began drawing maps compulsively. “I went to sleep just thinking about the way the Sierras turned into the Cascades,” he recalled, “or how vast the Mississippi Basin was.”

Two years later, while working as a chef in Montreal, Mr. Thomas found himself at a personal and professional crossroads. “I still hadn’t gone to college and still hadn’t made a career plan,” he said. “I was quite worried at the time, like, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’”

Mr. Thomas found his way out of the kitchen through a refrigerator.

A roommate had painted an old refrigerator white and he asked Mr. Thomas to decorate the doors. For six weeks he sketched America, complete with cityscapes and forests (though no animals), which attracted an audience of passing guests, who told him of their own travels as his fountain pen traveled from British Columbia to the Chilean coast.

“I loved it,” he said. “And the other thing I noticed was that everyone else loved it too.”

Later, when he moved to Australia, Mr Thomas honed his skills as an illustrator and cartographer, eventually spending five years a multi-layered, color map of North America.

When the coronavirus hit, he was about to send printouts of that card to clients, and it wasn’t until July 2020 that he was able to start work on “Wild World,” armed with a new easel and magnifying glass, and with a blank schedule. stretches out in front of him.

On July 28, 2023, with the pandemic long over, Thomas added the finishing touches to his map: six final creatures, including a golden-breasted songbird, a bat weighing less than half an ounce, and a bristly arachnid. In the staple-bound logbook in which he had recorded his work, he concluded in a biro scribble: “FINISH WILD WORLD!!!”

Since then, he’s been in “small business mode,” preparing to ship copies of “Wild World” worldwide. But the cartography – and the open track – beckon, and for his next project he hopes to combine the two.

For Mr. Patterson, the former Park Service cartographer, Mr. Thomas’s work stands alone: ​​done entirely by hand with no digital backups or erasing tools and with a level of detail that inspires the viewer to turn his nose ever closer to the page to place.

Is any other map maker doing something similar? Mr. Patterson paused. “No,” he said.

In a strange bit of synergy, both the indictment of former US President Donald Trump and the death of Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took place this week. Berlusconi was perhaps the OG of populist leaders whose political careers continued through a cascade of scandals and criminal cases.

Both are examples of how the weakening of mainstream political parties can open the field to charismatic outsiders with a populist streak.

In the early 1990s, Italy’s national “clean hands” survey revealed that widespread corruption had infected business, public works and politics, and found that the country’s political parties were largely funded by bribes. The two parties that had dominated Italian politics since the fall of fascism, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, fell apart after a wave of indictments. Just like almost every other established political party.

“The party system that was the anchor of the democratic regime in the postwar period essentially collapsed,” said Ken Roberts, a political scientist at Cornell University. told me a few years ago. “The result is a political vacuum filled by a populist outsider in Berlusconi.”

That conversation with Roberts in 2017 focused in particular on another country, where another corruption scandal opened the path to power for another right-wing outsider: Brazil, where an obscure lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro was just beginning to gain national appeal in the wake of the Carwash corruption investigation.

“I’m really worried that the whole system will collapse by cleaning it up,” Roberts said at the time. “I’m really afraid of what a Brazilian Berlusconi will look like.”

In another conversation this week, Roberts recalled that most analysts at the time were not taking Bolsonaro seriously. “But he started stirring, and my quote to you was anticipating his rise,” he said.

“I think it holds up pretty well over time,” he added.

A year after Roberts and I first spoke, Bolsonaro was elected president after running on a far-right platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage and full praise for Brazil’s former military dictatorship.

As his term was about to end, he warned for more than a year that he might not accept the results of the 2022 election if he didn’t win. When he lost, he made baseless claims of fraud. Eventually a mob of his supporters federal buildings overrun in Brasília, the capital, in a failed attempt to prevent the candidate who won the vote, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office.

Bolsonaro is now set to stand trial next week about his claims of electoral fraud.

Other examples of this pattern are not hard to find. In Venezuela, a series of corruption scandals created a power vacuum that Hugo Chávez easily filled with populist appeals, leading to an authoritarian government that by the time of are dead, oversaw a country beset by crises. In Guatemala, President Otto Pérez Molina forced a corruption investigation Out of office in 2015 he was replaced by Jimmy Morales, a charismatic television comedian with no political experience who used the slogan “neither corrupt nor a thief” as president. When the UN-backed group that had been investigating Molina also started looking at Morales, he said expelled from the country.

The United States has not had a massive corruption scandal that sent politicians to courtrooms and jail cells and decimated trust in their political parties. But, as I discussed in columns in April and May, Trump came to power after the Republican Party was severely weakened by other factors, including campaign finance laws that allowed big money donors to bypass the partyand the rise of social media meant it was party time no more gatekeeper for access to press and messages.

That kind of institutional weakness creates an opening for outside politicians who could one day be kept out of politics by robust political parties. But more specifically, it also favors a certain type of candidate, who has name recognition (perhaps a famous entertainer like Morales, a famous businessman like Berlusconi, or someone like Trump, who bridges both worlds), charisma, and a willingness to win. votes and headlines by embracing positions that would be taboo for mainstream candidates.

Unfortunately, it is rare that such politicians are also good at building new, strong institutions to replace those that their decline brought to power.

In Italy, Berlusconi presided and helped perpetuate decades of weak coalition governments and political unrest, not to mention the many corruption scandals he was caught up in. And that chaos seems to survive him.

“Even in death,” said my colleague Jason Horowitz, chief of the Rome bureau of The Times, wrote this week“Berlusconi had the power to shape the political universe and the ruling coalition of Ms. Meloni, of which his party, Forza Italia, is a small but critical pivot.”

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