New poll shows British people have become more positive about immigration
Bobby
Duffy, The Conversation, May 26, 2018
Michael
Gove, the British environment secretary, sparked a heated debate when he said recently: “Britain
has the most liberal attitude towards migration of any European country. And
that followed the Brexit vote.”
A bigger
welcome than elsewhere in Europe. John Stillwell/PA Archive
|
His
implication that the Brexit vote was a force for a more positive view of
immigration in Britain has been vigorously
challenged by some.
And you
can see why it might grate: analysis by King’s College London shows that media
coverage of immigration tripled in the campaign, and was “overwhelmingly
negative”.
But Gove
is right to say that people in Britain are now more positive about immigration,
as shown by new polling
released by Ipsos MORI, tracking attitudes towards immigration after
the recent Windrush
scandal.
Gove
cited an Ipsos survey
from the end of 2017, which does indeed show that from the ten European
countries included, Britain is most likely to think immigration has had a
positive effect on the country.
What people across Europe think about immigration. Ipsos MORI, Author provided |
A more recent European Commission survey across all 28 EU countries shows that, while the UK is not quite top, it is the third most likely to say that immigration is an opportunity rather than a problem, behind only Sweden and Ireland.
And this
is a shift that can’t be explained purely by the weight of negative media
coverage of immigration dying down after the referendum. I’ve been reviewing
immigration attitudes for nearly 20 years, and I’m really not used to seeing
Britain at the top of any league table of immigration positivity: this is
something new.
As the
chart below shows, positive attitudes have doubled in Britain since 2011, while
they’ve flatlined at a low level in most other countries, or fallen in the case
of Sweden.
An upward trend for Great Britain. Ipsos MORI, Author provided |
And as our new survey published by Ipsos MORI shows, this trend remains stable. The switch from a negative balance of opinion to a positive one started before the 2016 referendum on EU membership, in the middle of 2015 – but it did gain pace after.
The Brexit vote has changed little. Ipsos MORI, Author provided |
Reassurance
and regret
There are
two broad explanations for why this is happening – that the change is being
driven by “reassurance”, or “regret”.
The first
is the idea that people feel they can now say that immigration has positive
aspects, because numbers are coming down, or they believe numbers will be lower
in the future, as a result of Brexit.
Regret,
on the other hand, could be driven by a realisation of what we’re losing from
lower immigration: as numbers fall and warnings of skills shortages and
economic impacts increase, the extent to which the country benefits from
immigration becomes more obvious.
Clearly
these are simplifications – there are other explanations and these are not
mutually exclusive views. But in our latest survey, we tried to assess the
balance between these two explanations for the first time, by simply asking
people why they are more positive.
And as
the chart below shows, there is an almost perfect balance between the two
explanations: around four in ten say they’re more aware of the contribution
that immigrants make, and the same proportion say they’re reassured numbers are
falling or will fall.
Why have British people become more positive about immigration? Ipsos MORI, Author provided |
An
emotive debate
As with
so much about immigration attitudes, there is no one clear answer or view, and
therefore no clear indication for future policy and political direction. The
very real trends of increased positivity actually give the government little
clue as to whether they should loosen their drive to control numbers, or stick
to their guns on the “hostile
environment” immigration policy that has come in for so much
criticism in recent months.
Immigration
is well recognised as a polarising issue, and one of the key
topics in a referendum vote that split the country down the middle.
But
what’s more often missed is that our views are also full of nuance and
contradiction. There are not just two immovable and monolithic pro- and anti-immigration
blocs, as shown by our previous
research, and another of our just released
polls for the Evening Standard. For example, the majority of the
public would like to see the government’s cap on the number of doctors coming
to the UK from outside the EU lifted entirely or increased – but the majority
support the cap, or even greater restrictions, on computer scientists.
One thing
seems clear – British people’s increased positive outlook seems to be little to
do with the Brexit debate leading people to be better informed on immigration
facts, at least on key aspects like the scale of immigration. When we asked
what percentage of the population immigrants make up, which we’ve done regularly
over many years, the average guess was 28%, compared with a reality of around
13%: we are just as wrong as we’ve always been.
Of
course, this is because our emotions colour our views of scale as much as the
other way round. The immigration debate remains an emotive one, caught up in
our identity, culture and values more than cold calculations.
But all
these challenges don’t mean that attitudes to immigration should be ignored in
setting immigration policy. There is a case that Brexit was partly a result of
ignoring immigration concerns, rather than either acting to reassure people, or
challenging their views.
With a
white paper on the post-Brexit immigration system now expected
by July, the risk for the government comes not from listening to
apparently fickle and contradictory public opinion, it comes from mishearing or
caricaturing it – again.