Marley Morris, associate director at the IPPR think tank, said the results appear to reflect “nostalgia from the public for our pre-Brexit immigration model,” but added it would be “rash to assume this means there is public appetite for a return to free movement of people.”
“The overall preference for the pre-Brexit system is most likely the combined result of, on the one hand, the longstanding cohort of Remain supporters continuing to back a pro-EU position, alongside a wider frustration with recent immigration policy, including among those who voted leave.”
So nobody’s happy, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
Rating outcomes
Georgina Sturge, data consultant at Oxford’s Migration Observatory and author of the book “Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers,” said the results must be interpreted carefully.
“The key question for us is to what extent people are rating immigration systems based on a robust understanding of their different features, and how much of it is just people going off a vague impression — in other words, which systems give them good and bad vibes?” she said. “People’s knowledge of the ins and outs of different immigration systems is very limited on the whole.”
This much is obvious from More in Common’s results. POLITICO also had the pollster ask people what immigration systems they liked and disliked. The most popular was an “Australian-style points-based immigration system,” with a net 46 percent support. The least popular was “Britain’s current immigration policy,” with -39 percent support.
