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As the much debated, discussed, and campaigned-for Brexit ended on a globally negative note, a lot has been said about the economic repercussions of the vote. The pound slid downwards to a 30-year low, markets crashed, and every country is discussing how to think ahead of the Brexit, economically.
In its homeland, Britain sees the exit of its Prime Minister David Cameron, who, until the very end, passionately supported the ‘remain’ camp but had to accept what the British decided. With Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to stay in the European Union, a fresh referendum may crop up to decide whether these states will continue to remain a part of Britain.
The other most important outcome of leaving the EU, however, remains the change of immigrant laws. The European Union has been developing common immigration laws for all countries that are part of it since 2009. The rules of immigration, within and outside of EU countries, apply to all countries in the union.
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In 2004, post-communist nations like Slovenia and Hungary joined the EU, extending its boundaries and thereby allowing more people who could migrate in search of economic opportunities.
The new rules brought an influx of immigrants into the UK. “The size of the foreign-born population in the UK increased from about 3.8 million in 1993 to over 8.3 million in 2014,” says a report by The Migrant Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Even before the Brexit vote could be declared, Nigel Farage, UKIP Leader and supporter of the ‘leave’ camp, declared that his victory will be the victory of ‘decent people’, ‘real, ordinary people’.
His fight seemed to be against ‘indecent’ people or those who wouldn’t be allowed in Britain anymore, now that Brexit has passed.
In August 2015, the Daily Mail in the UK ran a report titled ‘How many more can we take?’ which detailed on the number of migrants that the UK had been housing. The report states that people of the UK believe that securing the borders is one of the most pressing issues in the country. One of David Cameron’s campaign promises was to reduce number of migrants without ‘ifs or buts’.
The campaign ‘I am an Immigrant’ running in the UK is also symbolic of the rhetoric that people who are not from the UK have to prove their worth – even though they are not from here, they have proved that they are eligible to stay because they have done something substantial for the country.
The Brexit rhetoric is also – not strangely enough – supported by the anti-immigrant crusader Donald Trump who is ready to ban Muslims and construct a wall to restrict Mexicans.
Like Trump, the anti-immigrant or xenophobic rhetoric of Brexit, hits the middle class exactly where it supposedly hurts the most. The middle class becomes the harbinger of populist anger that erupts from the idea that immigrants take away resources that rightfully belong to the people of British nationality and that the immigrants are responsible for various crimes since they are the ‘Other’ and don’t belong to Britain.
In 2012, in a speech Nigel Farage gave to impressionable young minds in a school, he blamed lack of jobs on immigration. He said, “Britain’s policy is irresponsible. We need to control immigration. We have 22 per cent of young people unemployed yet with open borders we are doing our own people out of jobs.” In 2013, he blamed a spate of crime on Romanians, calling it the ‘Romanian Crime Wave’. In 2014, among many other things, he attacked language and the common parlance and how the British don’t hear English being spoken anywhere anymore. “This country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable,” he said.
Statement such as these -parallels of which we see in the current Trump campaign for US presidency – are responsible for two things. One, they fuel the populist anger that the ‘Others’ are coming and taking the resources that the native population should have. Second, by attacking a value as fundamental as language, a certain sentiment of nationalism or loyalty toward the country is also aroused, that the population wouldn’t expect the immigrants to have.
The Brexit was a cool-aid for this anger. Farage and other supporters of the ‘Leave’ camp propagated their campaign with posters that said “we want our country back” and images of a large number of immigrants trying to enter the country with “Breaking Point – the EU has failed us” – not very different from what Trump is also saying.
The fight for the ‘Leave’ supporters thus became against the immigrants or the ‘Others’ and coupled with the anger that was all set to be doused by the Brexit, it won.
Trends show that while the 18-26 year age group voted to ‘remain’ in the UK, the older generations voted to ‘leave’. In the first EU referendum back in 1975, the ‘Yes’ vote – yes Britain should be a part of EU – received a thumping majority of 67%.
This may be indicative of the fact that while the younger generation was set to benefit if Britain stayed, the older generation is also the one that might have faced direct consequences of immigration ever since the UK joined the EU, back in 1973.
The ‘rightful claim’ that many native residents of various countries, cities, states, and regions, claim to make is not limited to EU alone. Echoes of this xenophobia or fear of immigration are found in various parts of the world.
However, in Britain, an entire political campaign was based on this rhetoric – Britain is of the British and no one else’s and it won, even if with a margin quite close. Not too far from there, in the US, the very same rhetoric is being pasted over and over again, to frighten and feed middle class minds and anger.