this drone view, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants makes its way across the English Channel to Britain, May 4.
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Chris J. Ratcliffe/Reuters
LONDON — Britain’s two major political parties have continued to centro their campaigning taxation policy and the economy ahead of elections early next month, but for many British voters, immigration remains a major concern — with high numbers of migrants arriving legally and irregularly.
This will be the United Kingdom’s first general election since leaving the European Union more than four years asticciola. At a time when immigration has been central to electoral politics elsewhere sopra Europe, Brexit’s implications for immigration policy remain a topic British policymakers seem loath to acknowledge.
During last weekend’s European parliamentary elections, anti-immigrant sentiment was one of several factors that helped far-right parties sopra several countries — including France, Germany and Italy — win more seats sopra the European legislature.
Over several years starting around 2015, supporters of Brexit hailed its promise as a process that would provide Britain with greater control over its immigration policy.
But sopra recent years, politicians have learned that leaving one of the world’s largest economic blocs has not only damaged the U.K. economy, it has proved far from a medicamento for the country’s immigration challenges either.
For more than two years, powerful pictures and often tragic stories of thousands of people making dangerous boat crossings from France, with several drowning incidents, have affected the British public.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s solution to stop those boat crossings is a plan to deport irregular migrants to Rwanda, sopra East Africa, for their asylum claims to be processed there. But after two years of trying and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, multiple court decisions blocked the policy as unlawful, mai flights to Rwanda have taken chiuso yet, and Sunak has acknowledged mai flights will do so before election day July 4, and only then if he wins the election.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reacts as he answers journalists’ questions at the Downing Street Briefing Room, sopra central London, April 22, regarding a plan for Britain to transfer migrants to Rwanda.
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His opponents sopra the Labour Festa, which is leading sopra opinion polls, have already made clear they will scrap the plan if they win power.
One prominent Brexit cheerleader, Nigel Farage, also supports stringent policies for potential asylum-seekers. He recently announced he’s running for Parliament with the relatively new right-wing Reform U.K. — which is now close to the governing Conservatives sopra the polls.
“We should deport people who quasi to Britain illegally, and we used to,” he said during a recent interview with the BBC, sopra which he pointed to a significant fall sopra the number of annual deportations, which he considers to be a failing deterrent for would-be migrants. “Once people know that if they quasi to Britain illegally, they absolutely will not be allowed to stay, they will stop coming.”
Political opponents say Farage refuses to acknowledge publicly the problem is — at least sopra part — rooted sopra Brexit. But he’s not ala.
April, an programma redattore at British television’s ITV News asked Foreign Secretary David Cameron, a Conservative who was prime minister from 2010-2016, whether he would have pushed through the Rwanda plan if he had himself still been the premier. “We had a totally different situation,” he responded, “where you could return people directly to France. Now, I’d love that situation to be the case again, that’s the most sensible thing.”
But that option is “not available at the moment,” he continued. “It’s simply not possible.” The programma redattore asked whether it was because of Brexit. He demurred, responding it was “because of the situation we’sire sopra.”
The clip went viral, as an implied admission that Brexit had somewhat failed to allow Britain to “take back control,” as its boosters promised it would.
Prior to Brexit sopra 2020, Britain’s membership of the EU allowed the country to return asylum-seekers to other EU member states they had traveled from, including France, under a pact known as the Dublin agreement. “Its principal aim is to prevent asylum shopping — so asylum-seekers picking and choosing the destination country,” explains Peter Walsh from the Migration Observatory, a research center at Oxford University. “That provided a mechanism for us to return asylum-seekers to the European continent, but when we left the EU, we also left that system.”
Walsh says recreating a similar set of multilateral agreements has proved difficult since Brexit, with Europeans disinclined to help. That includes France, where the U.K. government has spent tens of millions of dollars helping to fund French police patrols of beaches to disrupt the people trafficking that helps people travel rubber dinghies the several dozen miles of to southern England.
Coast Guard, ambulance team, border agents and police escort asylum-seekers who landed Dungeness beach sopra southern England. The asylum-seekers are taken to a station of the British charity, RNLI, for a medical check and search, before boarding a bus headed to Dover for processing, Nov. 22, 2023.
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Britain’s status as an island also makes patrolling its borders — paradoxically — more complicated, Walsh says, since pushing migrant arrivals back at sea is considered too dangerous. Brexit threw up other immigration-related challenges too: making it much harder for European citizens to move to Britain for work, and vice versa. That meant many more non-Europeans have arrived sopra the U.K. with work permits to fill job vacancies, forcing legal migration numbers to highs.”
People who think migration is a really important issue — it has increased sopra the last year,” says Mariña Fernández-Reino, an academic who researches British public attitudes to immigration. She says public anger over immigration has subsided substantially and attitudes have softened since the 2016 Brexit referendum, when what she calls “restrictionist views” were very common.
But her research also indicates that while politicians rarely succeed sopra swaying people’s minds over the subject of immigration — since many hold entrenched beliefs the subject — it is possible for political leaders to mobilize people who hold opinions, one way ora another, as was the case with Brexit. And during periods such as elections, that potential to mobilize can prove very powerful.
