Nearly half of British voters would support a complete shutdown of migration and for the government to embark upon a campaign of mass deportations, a survey from YouGov found.
According to the pollster, 45 per cent of people, a plurality of respondents, expressed support for the idea of “admitting no more new migrants, and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave.”
The sentiment was most commonly held among supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has advocated for a complete freeze on all legal immigration and has vowed to deport all illegal migrants living in the country. In total, 86 per cent of Reform voters said they supported such a measure.
However, demonstrating the breadth of the anger over mass migration, over a quarter of voters who back either the leftist Labour or Liberal Democrat parties also support shutting down immigration and large-scale removals.
Meanwhile, YouGov also found that immigration topped the list of most important issues facing the country, with 56 per cent listing it as their top priority, the highest level recorded by the survey firm since June of 2016, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum.
While Brexit was pitched to the public as a means of reducing immigration and taking back control of the nation’s borders from Brussels, immigration reforms from the subsequent so-called Conservative government of Boris Johnson opened the floodgates to record levels of migration by creating new, uncapped paths for non-EU migrants to enter the country.
Adding insult to injury, successive post-Brexit governments — both Tory and Labour — have refused to remove Britain from the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and its France-based court, which continues to be appealed to by migrants and open borders attorneys to block deportations on supposed human rights grounds.
At the same time, the number of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel from France has continued to grow, with a record 25,000 landing on British shores since the start of the year. In total, over 170,000 illegals have successfully reached the UK in small boats launched by people smugglers in France since the government began tracking such data in 2018.
The continued waves of illegal arrivals have put such a strain on the asylum system that the government has put up tens of thousands of migrants in hundreds of hotels and other taxpayer-funded accommodations dotted across the country. A recent wave of protests against migrant hotels was sparked last month in Epping after an Ethiopian illegal allegedly sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl from the area.
The YouGov survey seemingly attempted to demonstrate that the anger over illegal immigration was unjustified, claiming that it “may stem from a simple misconception.” The poll found that around half of the public (47 per cent) believe that there are more illegal migrants in the country than legal migrants.
However, Professor Matt Goodwin has previously suggested that this may be a function of the British public vastly underestimating the number of legal migrants allowed into the country, which stood at around 948,000 people last year alone.
According to Prof Goodwin, the rapid influx of foreigners will have a profound impact on the demographics of the country, predicting that white Britons will become a minority in their own country by the year 2063.
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