Brexiteers have promised to take back control of Britain’s borders. What happened?
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.