London – In part two of our original documentary series An Uncertain Future, we speak to four diverse consumers about how they feel immigration might change after Britain has left the European Union (EU).
When the referendum results were announced, with 52% of Britons voting to leave the EU, many pundits concluded that the vote was really a vote on immigration. One of the key pledges of the Conservative party is to reduce net migration to less then 100,000 migrants a year – down from the 273,000 that entered the country in the year to September 2016, according to the Office for National Statistics. In contrast, the Labour party, which has not yet released a figure, has promised to deliver a ‘fair’ immigration policy, while the Liberal Democrats have pledged to not impose a limit on immigration levels and want to remove students from official migration statistics. But did immigration have an impact on how our interviewees in Milton Keynes, Leeds, Cardiff and Norfolk voted?
To hear from Conservative Party member and Sikh Tories founder Harsimrat Kaur about why immigration was essential to her vote to leave the EU, despite being a second-generation immigrant, and why she believes it will make Britain a more open society, watch An Uncertain Future: On Immigration now.
Watch part one of our series, An Uncertain Future: On Politics, here and look out for the full series and report, which will be released on 8 June.
The Big Picture
- Immigration has moved from being a marginal concern to a frequently cited issue over the past 20 years, according to The Migration Observatory
- An Uncertain Future is part of a year-long analysis of consumer discontentment in the UK and in the US following the EU referendum and the 2016 presidential Election. For more, see our Dislocated World and American Middle macrotrends, and our panel of experts’ thoughts on Brexit