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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

You will find that non-European immigrants, especially from Commonwealth and ex-Commonwealth countries, also have a negative opinion of the previous preferential EU immigration rules. I have met many South African and Nigerian immigrants who found the disparity between their right to immigrate and that of EU citizens deeply unfair, and many who were eligible to vote in the Brexit referrendum chose to leave the EU for precicely that reason. They can hardly be accused of racism.

Besides which, the conflation of a desire for immigration control with racism is a lazy canard.

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What you say doesn't make any sense. As part of the EU, European citizens had the right to move to any countries of their choice. This was the very definition of being part of the EU. British nationals could move to any European countries, which they did in flock, and European nationals could also move to UK. South Africa was a third country, to which EU laws did not apply, hence their difference in treatment by the UK. The UK was part of a huge ensemble in which people could feely move from one place to another, it is no longer the case.

I agree that it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but its a real thing:

>One second generation immigrant I spoke to said some Pakistani people campaigned for Brexit because they wanted to “control immigration in a way that was favourable to the Indian subcontinent”.

>“One of their arguments was that, if we leave, we’d be better able to accept people from the Indian subcontinent, professionals such as doctors, rather than taking them from Europe,” he said. “There was that strand that we’d lost control of immigration, that lots of people from eastern Europe were coming over, but, therefore, people from the Indian subcontinent weren’t getting a fair crack at the whip and it was that disparity. They felt the immigration system was unfair.”

>While EU migrants generally benefit from freedom of movement, those from countries such as India and Pakistan are subject to visa and work restrictions – a distinction that was played on by Vote Leave’s Michael Gove during the referendum campaign when he suggested that Britain’s immigration system was “racist”.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/04/08/the-story-of-brexit-is-th...

This is something that actually really frustrated me about the Brexit referendum. I remember reading an opinion piece in the NZ herald from a women who explained why she was voting in favour of Brexit. What it basically boiled down to was that she was jealous that EU citizens had freedom of movement with the UK and she didn't.

But conversely during the time that she was allowed to be in the UK, she had the right to vote while EU citizens didn't.

Like you I don't think commonwealth citizens who voted for Brexit were being racist, I do think it was sometimes vindictive though which doesn't really make it much better.

i find such logic hard to understand: UK was part of the EU, hence the open labour market. That's the whole point of EU. What did they find unfair exactly -- that Nigeria was not part of the EU? Or that countries can agree to have an open labour market?

Long before the UK joined the EU it was a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and had close relationships to countries that once were part of the Empire. Before the EU, most UK immigration came from Commonwealth countries. Freedom of movement allowed easy immigration from Europe and greater restrictions on Commonwealth immigration. People from those countries believe that the UK has prior obligations to members of the Commonwealth, and that it should prioritize those obligations (and often that privileging EU immigration is racist.) You can see the post-Brexit shift to previous obligations with the easing of immigration rules for Hong Kong citizens.

how did joining the EU restrict Commonwealth immigration?

It doesn't. The policy of restricting Commonwealth immigration was brought in after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Ugand... in response to complaints that there were "too many" immigrants.

Voters felt levels of immigration in general were too high and leading to strained public services. EU law forbids restrictions on intra-EU immigration, so the only legal path to making voters happier was to heavily restrict immigration from everywhere else. It didn't work: the numbers from the EU were far too high to be offset via such a tactic, but it was at least something.

The numbers are still viewed as being too high though post-lockdowns who knows what will happen. But the limits can at least now be spread around all countries equally, and people can be prioritised based on e.g. demand for their skills. This was previously forbidden.

This has nothing to do with logic. It's a knee-jerk reaction, and the pro-Brexit propaganda played it hard (alongside other similar arguments).

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