Brexit, 'EU Immigration' and Anti-Discrimination

Our contribution examines what lies underneath the “EU immigration” hypothesis that has become such a dominant interpretation of the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum. To speak of “EU immigration” is a legally as well as sociologically inadequate view of free movement and population in the UK and Europe. In a first section, we sketch some of the key political science sources on the EU referendum, showing how these works have in effect uncritically confirmed and reproduced a reading of “EU immigration” and Brexit uncomfortably close to the one promoted by the UK Independence Party (UKIP)’s leading figure Nigel Farage. In the second, we introduce into a debate dominated by specialists of public opinion and electoral analysis, the view of migration scholars: facts about immigration, migration, mobilities and free movement in the UK, as well as facts about the dynamics and effects of migration and the European labour market in a comparative European context. As a political issue, the “democratic” effects of migration need to be separated from its economic and demographic drivers. Each have their own potential sustainability in any given context. As we will show, in the UK, the problem with migration and mobility is strictly one about its popular democratic sustainability, not its economic or demographic features—particularly when viewed comparatively. In a third section, we consider the evolution of legal and policy responses to the Brexit vote, as political leaders wrestled with reconciling the needs of a porous, highly transnational economy and society with the false, nationally-bounded understanding of “the people”. This talks us through the details of former Prime Minister David Cameron’s fateful deal on EU migration before the vote, to the consequences after it, and the unfolding of the ongoing negotiation over the UK’s exit. The conclusion then speculates on the likely scenarios for migration in a post-Brexit Britain.