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I'm one of those Commonwealth nationals resident in the UK with the right to vote in this referendum. I had thought the case for the UK staying in the EU was obvious until I started thinking about it and, in the process, stumbled upon a frustratingly alluring argument for me -- and other non-EU, British-resident Commonwealth nationals (that is, other Commonwealth nationals legally living in the UK who are not also nationals of an EU country) -- to vote for the UK to leave. The argument runs like this. The UK's current level of migration is seen as a problem by the current UK government, by a significant proportion of British citizens, and probably even by a good few in the left-leaning parties. While the UK's in the EU, there's almost nothing that can be done to curb skilled or unskilled migration from the EU. Any government of a UK in the EU that wants to curb migration has to do so by clamping down on non-EU migrants. There's already no legal unskilled migrant route to the UK, so that means cutting back on skilled migration. That clamping down is for me a personal pain, so much of a pain that it feels like every time I see Theresa May in the news it's because she wants to make it harder for me and other non-EU nationals to work in the UK. (I try really, really hard not to hate her.) If the UK left the EU, that'd allow the British government to apply the same rules across the board (to EU citizens as well as non-EU citizens) which'd probably lead to any UK government (from migration-hating UKIP to migration-loving Greens) having a more sensible approach to skilled migration. And not only is that in my own interest as a non-EU Commonwealth national, it's also in the UK's interest as far as having a sensible skilled migration policy goes. This argument is, of course, too narrow on something as broad as the UK's members in the EU to be enough: it doesn't deal with the host of other things around British EU membership (wealth, security, environment, international influence etc). But my working visa issues are so frustrating that I find it a very, very tempting argument. |