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Well I am paraphrasing form a whole bunch of polls and focus groups and the like over near 20 years. It is true you could reduce how much people valued the economy over immigration by rewording the questions and because the Tory part has internal splits on immigration, we often had different polls with different skewed wordings. But on all of them even worded to try and side with immigration as much as possible, people always valued essentially "line go up" over reducing immigration.
Even in focus groups where you might run through various scenarios in detail, and in some cases where we trying to see under what circumstances people might give different answers, it was pretty much always "It's the economy, stupid".
Now part of that might be because the Conservatives are seen as the party of being good with the economy. Or were at least, so Labour might get a little more leeway with their supporters. But they also have a much smaller (though still existent!) anti-immigration faction, so they aren't even looking at the question as hard in the first place. And of course some of their supporters are very pro-immigration. So it will have to be the Conservative party if anyone I would suggest. Though some of their anti-immigration faction has boiled off into UKIP and then Reform nowadays, so the internal faction balances has likely shifted.
But essentially if Tory modelling indicated they would win more votes than they would lose from cracking down on immigration, then they are likely to flip. There are few pro-immigration idealogues within the party. Though the farming lobby comes close I suppose, for many of the same reasons as in the US. Low-paid Eastern European labor helps British farms be competitive.
Well, since you don't remember the exact wording, the whole conversation is kind of moot, but coming back to a generic "it's the economy stupid" is an unconvincing argument. Sure, if you tell people they can either choose high unemployment or high immigration, they might go with high immigration, but that's not a particularly supportable claim. If you talk about "the economy" in generic terms, they might fill-in the blanks with things that matter to them the most.
I'm just telling you the internal situation. And they were getting the same results before me and after me, and even when we were reporting anti-immigration ministers, over literal decades with different questions polls and groups.
Whether they are right or wrong, that is what they believe, so that is the attack vector that has most chance of success in my view.
I think the thing anti-immigration hardliners don't realize is most people don't care about the issue as deeply as they do. Looking at the most recent UK elections, there's about 15% of the voting population that's truly and deeply anti-immigration.
There may be majorities super majorities for various anti-migration actions, but people's actual feelings on them are actually, 'sure, why not' to 'not really caring one way or the other, but it seems better' then not thinking about it again, and other issues may easily shift their view on said issue.
So, the fact polling shows a majority of people may say they want draconian immigration measures is sort of like the polling my left-wing friends sometimes point too as proof people want a wide raft of progressive economic stuff, but then don't vote for the candidate supporting said things, either in the primary or the general.
That's because they may agree, but they care less about those issues than issue y or z.
Like, I'm a left-wing social democrat who cares deeply about a lot of things, but I also realize I'm a weirdo who cares more than 95% of the US does about any specific issue, so I understand issue polling is at best, hazy.
I think there are mote people than you might think who are anti-immigration. But thats not to say they are anti-immigration as a priority.
Certainly working class populations in the North and Midlands are pretty anti-immigratiin. But they also know the Tories are not likely to help out their areas. And Reform numbers were probably depressed by the fact everyone knows they won't actually get into government this time around.
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