The deadline for applications to the EU settlement scheme passed yesterday. The mechanism is part of a huge and almost entirely overlooked shift in the politics of immigration. That shift has seen a country that left the EU partly because of concerns about immigration adopt migration policies that are strikingly open and, indeed, potentially more permissive than the ones we had before Brexit.
That might seem a contentious claim, given regular headlines about Home Office brutality towards illegal migrants. But such cases are a fraction of overall migration. When it comes to the majority of foreign nationals in Britain, the government approach is often — quietly — rather liberal.
Under the scheme, any EU national who can prove they have been in the UK for five years can claim permanent residency. That’s a lower requirement than the one under EU freedom of movement rules, where residency requires evidence of employment. Some EU nationals who could not claim UK residency before Brexit can now do so.
About 5.3 million people have applied for settled status, while the Home Office had expected between 3.5 million and 4.1 million. The discrepancy in those numbers demonstrates the fallibility of official population estimates. The numbers themselves and the lack of reaction to them demonstrate something more important about Britain’s immigration debate.
Five years after voting for Brexit, Britain has a policy that will allow millions of EU nationals to settle here permanently, including perhaps a million people previously unknown to the authorities. Once, this would have guaranteed fierce political and public debate, headlines and controversy. Now, the scheme and European migration in general draw little attention. Since even before the 2016 referendum, immigration has been dropping down the public’s priority list. In 2015, almost six in ten voters said it was the top issue facing Britain. Now it’s barely one in ten.
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The quiet liberalism of the EU scheme also proves that hardliners on both sides of the Brexit divide were wrong. Those Remainers who read the Leave vote as a sign of xenophobia were mistaken: EU nationals have not been driven out of Brexit Britain. Those Leavers who sold the referendum result as a vote for pulling up the drawbridge were wrong, too: the public is unconcerned by an open approach to EU nationals.
Our changing immigration story shows that, as so often, the British public are more relaxed and sensible than strident political voices give them credit for.
James Kirkup is director of the Social Market Foundation
