Immigration was not the main reason of voting Brexit. UKIP is not 51% of the UK electorate. I am surprised to see that, years after that vote, there are still gross misinformation circulating around it.
I felt in most pro-Brexit messages, there was an undercurrent of "...because we are better" or "and then they won't steal your jobs". EU parliament? Full of foreigners. Immigration? All foreigners. What's wrong with the steel industry? Foreigners working cheaply in other countries, or undercutting honest British workers here in Britain.
That's not to say there aren't adverse effects of internationalisation, or to belittle people who suffer from them. But this whole "taking back control" agenda was steeped with British exceptionalism and exclusivity.
Immigration was literally the sticking point of what triggered the whole shitshow. When David Cameron did his EU roadtrip to negotiate a better deal for the UK ("give us what we want or we'll leave"), there were 2 sticking point requests: lower the EU fee, and curb EU immigration. EU said no, Cameron called the talks over, and organised the sorry referendum.
There was the argument of sovereignty for example which was aggressively shot down as xenophobia, although it is pretty much true. Nobody within the EU ever denied that it to be a reality, it was openly talked about.
The argument was that there is a larger scope that is also relevant for international policy, but that wasn't even mentioned anymore.
So people were directly and obviously lied to and their argument was misconstrued and people just didn't buy it. If the lie wouldn't have been created, maybe the EU would be larger today.
Perhaps it wasn't a smart move to leave. But the advertising for remaining in the EU was extremely incompetent. To reduce it to xenophobia is still reductive like that.
One of the big thing that triggered the EU debate os the inability to expel Abu Al I dont know what, famous pro-Al Qaida preacher that could not be expelled because of EU laws, and bragged about being housed by the UK taxpayer while preaching Jihad quietly.
I genuinely don't know how much I believe people when they say that, though; sometimes people saying that are unable to provide specific decisions that were made outside the UK (so not for any obvious practical reason or lived example), but also are unable to expand on the more philosophical aspects of the principle itself or discuss how far such local desision making should go. I might expect a genuinely held belief to be able to do at least one of those.
In the interests of full disclosure, I do find that when people say that, I do instantly wonder how true that is; I do find myself instantly suspicious, which I am sure then colours my subsequent conclusions.
Given that's the only thing Brexit actually changed, you should probably believe people when they say that's what they wanted (if they voted for it). You seem to be assuming that if you talked to some people who aren't articulate enough they didn't have real reasons?
The desire for this is reasonable. There are lots of cases where dumb decisions were taken outside the UK against the will of the local government, many of which led to long-lasting resentment:
1. Most obviously, the total refusal by the EU to let the UK control immigration, which basically crushed all wage growth out of existence for nearly two decades. Also see: Germany's brilliant decision to let a million migrants in (at which point they can freely move elsewhere). Also: inability to prioritize immigrants from other English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, USA.
2. Transcription of vague "human rights" principles into actual law, which led to a lot of notorious high profile cases where the government tried to deport e.g. radical Islamists and the EU courts rejected it, or where criminals ended up basically playing the government by making mendacious arguments under these laws. This was especially nasty because the UK and Poland saw this problem coming and got confirmation in the treaties that EU human rights law wouldn't apply to the UK, in writing, as clearly as possible, and then the ECJ overturned it anyway in a pretty flagrant bit of judicial activism.
3. EU cookie laws. 100% stupid, never supported by the UK government, now being rolled back.
4. Fishing quotas that allocated most UK fish to other countries. Hence why fish is such an electric issue post-leaving.
5. CAP, which is basically a way to force Brits to subsidize French farmers. See also: the extremely high level of EU controlled subsidies and spending that create large amounts of waste, fraud and general weakness in the business sector.
There are a whole lot of others people might bring up, that's just some examples.
That's not to say there aren't adverse effects of internationalisation, or to belittle people who suffer from them. But this whole "taking back control" agenda was steeped with British exceptionalism and exclusivity.
Immigration was literally the sticking point of what triggered the whole shitshow. When David Cameron did his EU roadtrip to negotiate a better deal for the UK ("give us what we want or we'll leave"), there were 2 sticking point requests: lower the EU fee, and curb EU immigration. EU said no, Cameron called the talks over, and organised the sorry referendum.