Are we a country more pleased than irked to live in increasingly diverse towns and cities? Do we feel our workplaces are enhanced by immigrants? Or has the Government – intent on stopping Channel boats and striving to make a complicated “Rwanda plan” work – grasped the national mood?
The oddity of Britain is that we are both at once. It’s something of a paradox.
If you are liberally minded on this matter, there’s some comfort in the latest European Social Survey, which shows that views on immigration, as well as its economic and cultural impact have become more favourable; significantly more so since 2016. For the first time, a majority of those asked ranked immigration as “very positive” and a boon to those already living in Britain.
This is welcome news, at least in the sense of challenging the stereotype of an unwelcoming “Little England”. But this is not the full story, because attitudes are often complex or contradictory. Some people think local immigration is too high when it puts pressure on schools and hospitals but are less fussed by overall numbers. Others fret about high net migration but enjoy the benefits of diversity in their own lives.
The latest survey might seem like the ideal opportunity for the Government (closely shadowed by Labour when it comes to cautious messaging about immigration numbers) to heed the results and relax its gatekeeping. Perhaps Rishi Sunak might abandon that (unfulfilled) pledge to bring down overall immigration numbers.
This would, however, be a category error. It is perfectly possible that we grasp a necessary truth – that fast-changing economies need access to foreign-born labour to thrive. It is significant that our acceptance of immigration has leapt forward since 2016 specifically. That won’t be because Leave voters woke up the next day, month or year and saw the error of their ways.
More likely, the referendum, with its pledge to “take back control” de-fanged a heated mood about immigration, precisely because it signalled to voters – who equated EU membership with loss of control over who came into the country – that they could influence who came and who did not. That has duly produced the next paradox – which is that the Government both does and does not want a high level of immigration.
Net figures of incomers are, at the high end of the scale, around a million over the past two years. That’s fuelled by 1.4 million migrants (primarily from outside the EU) being granted visas to enter the UK to work or study (numbers here are more robust than predicted by many doomsters in higher education) – and by our fast-tracking of asylum claims from Ukraine, Syria and Hong Kong. In other words, Britain remains more open than closed, which fuels attacks from the Faragist Right that the Government is incoherent.
The most likely message, in a field where attitudes surveys are prone to selective interpretation, is that voters care more about control over the ways and means of immigration, than they do about how many people come into the country.
But that suggests that the Government is right to prioritise tackling irregular means of entering the country and this will remain electorally powerful. If Sunak cannot claim to have “stopped the boats” he can claim a substantial reduction in numbers of those seeking to enter the asylum system in a dangerous way that causes anxieties about control of borders.
He’s not alone in this either – as well as right-wing governments in Austria (looking to make common cause with the UK on the Rwanda plan) and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, elected on the promise of bringing down asylum numbers – Germany’s centre-left leader Olaf Scholz has talked about the need for those who do not meet asylum criteria to be more speedily removed in an attempt to curb a refugee influx last month.
In other words, an appetite for more say on who comes into countries is on the rise. Moods can also change – which is one reason Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor from the Greens issued a clarion call for German Muslims to speak out more forcefully on antisemitism, with the aim of diffusing growing dissension on the Israel/Gaza conflict.
National preoccupations can differ but there is a paradox which exists across countries which are attractive destinations for those fleeing oppression, or in search of a way out of poverty to a better life; something most of us would also demand for ourselves in their position.
An open approach to accepting those from elsewhere is the sign of an attractive society (very few people from the West are clamouring to get into Russia or Iran to enhance their life options). Conversely, accountability matters and voters get angsty when they feel it is lacking. So, taking back control, turns out not to be such a bad slogan after all – as long as it doesn’t just mean keeping foreigners out, which turns out to be a bad idea after all.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and host of the Power Play podcast
