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I am suggesting that a big chunk of the public (20%? 30%?) wants less immigration AND will react negatively to any politician who says that immigration should be lower, or to newspaper headlines showing active attempts to dissuade immigration. They want immigration to go down quietly and out of sight, whilst retaining the moral high-ground by never supporting anyone who comes across as anti-immigration.
There is a decent chunk of hardcore lower-immigration voters who don't care, but they don't form a voting majority without the high-ground chunk. And the pro-immigration groups can therefore force anti-immigration politicians to back down by putting them into a position where they either have to abandon attempts to reduce immigration or defend them in public.
In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so. I don't remember it featuring in Remainer discourse - they focused on the loss of UK opportunities to work abroad and avoided the topic of incoming immigration because it was an obvious vote loser. And as you say, seeing salaries plummet during the Boriswave and soar during Covid quarantine made it really impossible to defend.
It was pretty much what the Boris/Sunak governments believed privately, if not publicly. Sunak himself thought that if illegal immigration was under control, then the public didn't care what happened to legal migration. The assumption was that a massive increase in legal migration would supercharge tax revenues, reduce inflation (by suppressing wage growth) and give the Tories the best chance at winning the next election.
What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.
What I found illuminating about this was that it really showed that even center-right to right-wing politicians mostly don't believe there are any actual group-level differences in ability to contribute productively in a highly developed economy. I think on some level I had assumed they recognised it but didn't acknowledge it publicly (for obvious reasons) but no, it seems they really did think that people from vastly different populations were all interchangable.
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The actual story is slightly more complex than that. The dumb rules the Tories passed mean that the OBR has a lot of implicit power, and the treasury’s “projections” showed that immigration was necessary for GDP / tax revenue growth sufficient for planned borrowing not to freak out markets. That was coupled with the fact that 80%+ of Tory MPs, even on the socially conservative Rees Moggian wing of the party, didn’t care at all about immigration. That left Patel and Braverman relatively isolated. Boris himself didn’t care about immigration, and Sunak doesn’t really care about anything, but they alone aren’t responsible more than the party at large.
Yes I was considering talking about the OBR rules, with their explicit assumptions that all immigrants are going to be as productive as natives and the fact that they don't take long term tax and spending into account. All in all a profound failure of the political class, especially since the Boris-wave will all have been granted indefinite leave to remain before the end of the Starmer government. Permanently impoverishing the country for...nothing.
Indeed. But one can hardly be surprised with merely another decade of terrible decision making after almost 100 years of it, punctuated by only the occasional few years of sanity before it goes to shit again.
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That's true. I read them as being more concerned with avoiding potential economic catastrophe by cutting off the flow than actively believing that they could supercharge the economy by increasing it. The Singapore-on-Thames people were more willing to propose immigration up == economy up, but even then they usually talked about skilled migrants. Plus the internalised cringe that kicks in whenever a well-educated Brit tries to publicly or privately debate whether immigration is a good idea.
IMO this combination of cringe + PR + risk avoidance would explain why they continued the policy for so long and didn't implement selection or block dependents. But you may well be right.
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