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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

that's a lot of assumptions about people who voted to leave. Not all (or even, I would wager, most) were anti-immigration working class voters. I voted leave, as well as at least 5 other people I know who are open enough about politics to admit it - and they're the minority of people right of Corbyn who are willing to admit it publicly.

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I think surveys have shown the leave vote was mostly about immigration:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-latest...

But perhaps you have other data that supports your case?

> Not all (or even, I would wager, most) were anti-immigration working class voters.

If you re-read the above you'll see that I didn't claim to have data on the matter. I'm perfectly open to the idea that a large share of the leave vote is anti-immigration (although that sentiment itself has a broad range of meanings from intolerant to reasoned), but my point was to highlight the perception of leave voters as being generally xenophobic members of the working class as being inaccurate or at the very least, a broad stroke of the brush. Through discussing the vote with the other leavers I know, not once was immigration mentioned as a concern, and we all work in average-to-senior software roles, not Dave the van man who rants about Polish people coming for his job.

Oh ok, so just anti-immigration? Not anti-immigration and working class?

Your anecdotal evidence is not very useful in a reasonable discussion, and it might be more interesting to have a data based discussion (if you have some data).

You seem intent on painting a picture more than reading what I actually wrote:

>Through discussing the vote with the other leavers I know, not once was immigration mentioned as a concern

You seem to be a bit obsessed with backing everything with data. Do you want me to make a survey for the people I've spoken to? I'm not trying to say "immigration is not the issue and I have proof!", I'm saying that immigration isn't the issue for everyone, and that there are people in the main HN - reading demographic (and more than just me and the 5 I know, although I'm sure you're going to ask for a citation) that A. Don't match the image in your head and B. Didn't vote the way they did as some kind of attempt to lock out immigrants.

Your suggestion that discussions can only be had by providing data is just not true. If I were trying to assert a claim large enough to need a sample size then sure, but I'm not.

Your claim here seems to be that there are >1 people who voted for Brexit for reasons other than immigration.

That is reasonably obvious, and not useful basis for a discussion on Brexit.

If you want to gain a better understanding of why people in general voted for Brexit, data would be valuable. Everything else is anicdotal, and not very useful.

I guess that depends on whether your primary concern is getting a handle on the majority vote and the demographic involved, where poorer people voted for a mix of reducing immigration and returning legal sovereignty to British courts, or surfacing the opinions of those who voted leave despite those not being primary concerns and who are in the same income demographic as HN readers who seem to believe that people in their class don't vote Brexit. If you're not interested in the latter then I don't have anything to show you.

In order to support the second point, more data would be required. Essentially all you’ve provided is anecdotal evidence, which isn’t very convincing.

How would you support the claim that people in the “HN demographic” voted in significant numbers for leave?

I don't think it was 'mostly' about immigration, but there were other reasons as well. Of course I don't deny that immigration was a reason for many people to vote leave, but I don't think it is as cut and dry as you suggest.

For example this poll from the referendum shows that the no. 1 reason people voted to leave was 'decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK'

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-...

Edit: typo

That’s a really interesting link, thanks. The number 2 reason was immigration. I can see that it might be possible that immigration is a subset of “decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. I.e. the immigration policy shouldn’t be set by the EU.

It also suggests that leave voter see multiculturalism, feminism, the Green movement, globalisation and immigration as negatives (80%). Overall I see this as supporting the notion that the leave vote was anti-immigration, perhaps as part of a wider distrust of outside influences.

Anti-immigration sentiment in the UK is to a large extent driven by lagging infrastructure.

As just a single example the housebuilding industry has been consistently able to build fewer houses than there are people arriving by a large number, and the statistics over how many people are arriving are themselves deeply suspect - they don't correlate with any other population related statistics, and are based on airport surveys that ask a subset of people whether they plan to stay for a long period.

If politicians allow immigration at levels significantly above the speed at which infrastructure can be built out to support the new people then infrastructure reliability and availability will decline. It is reasonable to be concerned about that if you rely on that infrastructure.

The idea of Brexit voters as incorrigible racists isn't supportable, no datasets of any integrity show that and the brief spike of "omg britain is so racist" died down very quickly after the referendum, simply because the UK is and remains by far the most racially diverse nation in Europe.

The direct claim in the indie that large proportion of folk that have immigration concerns voted leave does not support the thesis that most leavers had immigration concerns, etc.

Can a survey tell you how many people distrust surveys (as in, refuse to take them)?

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