What if they knew?
People underestimate migration by 10 times
This article was first published in UnHerd. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.
Ever since Orwell wrote ‘Ignorance is strength’, the left have seen every expression of the right-wing views of the British public as evidence that they are ignorant.
The populace have been kept uniformed, either because they are naturally unintelligent, or because some nefarious influence is manipulating them by keeping them so. This is the school of thought from which Brexit denialism springs; the electorate of the most Eurosceptic nation in the bloc could only have voted for Brexit due to being mislead; by Farage, by Putin, by some numbers of the side of a bus.
This school of thought is lazy, belittling and spreading. Witness, for instance, the latest argument on migration; YouGov has published new in-depth polling, which indicates that the most widely supported immigration policy is to significantly reduce migration while still allowing some migrants into the country, almost half of voters support stricter measures. Specifically, 26% strongly back stopping all new migration and requiring many recent migrants to leave, with a further 19% somewhat in favour.
But that is not new, nor shocking; the statistics the left has seized upon is that almost half of respondents thought there were more immigrants staying in the UK illegally than legally, and that only 19% said that there was “much more” legal than illegal immigration (which is almost certainly the correct answer, even allowing for the very highest estimates of the level of unauthorised migration).
This, The Guardian argues, ‘shows a clear link between having hardline anti-immigrant views and being ignorant about the level of illegal immigration into the UK.’ On LBC, as if he’d read this piece before I had even written it, James O’Brien declared that it proved ‘We are a gaslit nation’, as the ‘sons and daughters of Brexit are fed a diet of misinformation’.
Reality, as it so often is, is a bit more complex. The electorate’s mistake is not so much down to an overestimation of the scale of illegal migration but an underestimation of the scale of legal migration.
Last year, the think tank Onward decided to dig down into the public mood on immigration. One of the key questions they decided to investigate was that polling only ever showed voter’s support for immigration coming down or going up; but what was the reference point from which they were working?
The median guess was 70,000. A figure ten times lower than the 672,000 net migration figure for 2023, and 17 times lower than the gross immigration figure of 1.2 million.
Despite that gross underestimation, the voters of nearly nine in ten constituencies want immigration levels reduced and controls tightened – and of the remaining 75 seats where people prefer higher immigration and relaxed controls, 52 were in London. And polling around immigration consistently shows a majority of the electorate supporting a reduction in migration – as the YouGov poll shows.
This should come as a warning to Labour. In government, the party has spent much political and financial capital on tackling the Channel crossings; yet they are higher this year than ever before, and look set to exceed 50,000 for the first time. Labour’s barrage of new announcements – including the return deal with France, which is implemented tomorrow – are still yet to catch up from the loss of the deterrent effect of the Rwanda scheme, which Labour cancelled in one of their first moves in office.
Leftist elites are constantly conscious of the failure of sans-cullotes to play the role ascribed to them; by contrast the failure of elites to deliver the ideals of leftism in the French Revolution, the USSR et al are conveniently forgotten. Were the British public ‘informed’ about the true scale of the last 25 years of the migration they have never asked for, and never wanted, it is likely the left would feel even more betrayed than they do now. The higher migration numbers rise, the more public anger will rise, and the further Reform will rise. The Left should praise the fact that the public don’t know the numbers better.
This article (What if they knew?) was created and published by Tom Jones and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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