THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION

9. Beyond the election: challenges
for a new Parliament
After a period of comparative quiet on immigration during the
election campaign, immigration is firmly back in the headlines. Having
avoided talking about immigration, where possible, on the campaign trail,
the re-elected Prime Minister immediately took “personal control” of the
issue, within three weeks of the election.
The occasion was the quarterly net migration figures, which rose
in May and then hit an all-time high in August, as the government found
itself further and further from its pledge to reduce the numbers to ‘tens of
thousands’.
Within weeks, the Government then found itself responding to
public pressure to be more welcoming to refugees. Debate around the
Syrian refugee crisis shifted dramatically in early September, catalysed by
the publication of a photograph of Aylan Kudi, a three-year-old child who
drowned off the coast of Turkey.
Most UK newspapers carried the photograph in sympathetic
front-page stories about refugees, including outlets such as the Daily
Mail and The Sun that have tended towards a more sceptical stance on
immigration. There was considerable mobilisation of liberal pro-migration
sentiment, with hundreds of thousands signing a petition calling for more
action from the UK government. An unusually broad coalition of political
support urged further action, with strikingly few public voices willing to
speak out in opposition to the UK resettling more refugees from Syria.
As the campaigns gear up to fight the EU referendum, perhaps
thedominant issue of this Parliament, the question of how prominent
immigration will be, both to the Prime Minister’s renegotiation and
reform agenda and to the campaign for leaving the EU, has also hit the
headlines once more. It appears clear that while immigration may have
briefly ‘gone away’ as an issue during the election, it is unlikely to do so
again.
43 British Future / The Politics of Immigration