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by youngtaff 478 days ago
> It was partly about immigration

My view is it’s actually about people being racist

2 comments

Well there is no evidence to back that up. In fact there is plenty that indicates the opposite.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk...

There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).

> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution

> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.

Direct link to the stats:

https://public.tableau.com/views/Publicopinion2023/FIGURE5?:...

My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.

I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.

It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?
I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.

Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.

Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked

> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.

> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.

It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.

> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.

Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.