This essay, on why the public is more liberal about immigration than are politicians, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 May 2023, under the headline “It’s no longer ‘the will of the people’ to turn our back on asylum seekers”.

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“It is designed to meet the will of the British people in a humane and fair way.” So wrote the home secretary, Suella Braverman, and the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, about the government’s Illegal Immigration Bill in a Times op-ed last week.

The Bill seeks to detain and remove all migrants who arrive in this country by irregular means and to ban them from ever applying for asylum here. The question of whether government policy is “humane” and “fair”, I have already written about. But what of it being “the will of the British people”?

In April 2022, a YouGov poll showed that 35% of the British people supported the government’s Rwanda deportation scheme, while 42% opposed it. A year later, this March, 42% supported the government plans, while 39% opposed them – a slight shift towards backing the government, but still less than a majority, and still relatively evenly divided. Other polls have similarly revealed a population with a plurality of views.

When presented with alternatives, support for government policy plummets. Polling suggests that just 10% of Britons think the best way to deal with migrants in small boats is to deport them to Rwanda. Almost four times as many – 39% – prefer the government to “make it easier for people to apply for asylum in Britain from overseas”.

Far from government legislation meeting the “will of the people”, Britons are divided on the issue. Most favour “fairness” in immigration and asylum policy, and much of the opposition to the Rwanda deportation scheme is precisely because many recognise it as manifestly unfair and immoral.

There is a broader context to this. Britain has, in recent years, become more liberal about immigration. Researchers at the Policy Institute at King’s College London have shown that globally Britain is the most relaxed nation when it comes to immigration. A majority believes that any number of people should be able to come to Britain so long as jobs are available; fewer than a third want strict limits on those coming in. A majority also hails immigration as having a “positive” effect on the nation; just one in 10 disagrees. Far more think that immigration has no impact on unemployment and crime than think it does.

Exposed here is a chasm between the way most people regard the issue and the way it is presented by politicians and commentators. If all we listened to were the debates at Westminster or in the media, we might imagine that Britain was a nation hostile to, and neurotic about, immigration, rather than one that has become far more relaxed about it.

What many people want, according to the thinktank British Future, is a system that prioritises control over numbers. Its polling shows that significantly more people believe it important for the government to have control over who can come to Britain, irrespective of the numbers coming in, than think the government should prioritise deterring people from coming to keep the numbers low.

That thesis may be tested soon. Attitudes to immigration have become more liberal at the very time regular immigration has been increasing. Figures published last November showed net inward migration of 504,000 in the year to June 2022 – half a million more people came to Britain than left. Some speculate that when figures for the whole of 2022 are released later this month, the data might show a net increase of up to a million.

The figures for 2022 are unusual, partly because of large numbers of Ukrainian and Hong Kong refugees admitted last year and partly because of a post-pandemic rebound, mainly for students and those arriving on the new health and care worker visa. The numbers are likely to fall next year.

Nevertheless, many commentators have raised the alarm, viewing these numbers as revealing a “lack of control” over immigration, rather than, as others have observed, the post-Brexit system working as designed.

Whether the public will continue to be relaxed about immigration, given the weight of political panic over both Channel migrants and regular immigration, remains to be seen. The intensity of the political and media discussion may be one reason that, while Britons have become warmer to immigration, polls nevertheless reveal a widespread perception of public attitudes as having turned more negative.

There is currently much debate about the role of the “liberal elite” in ignoring the “will of the public” and imposing their own views on policy. The irony is that, when it comes to immigration, if anyone is out of touch with the public, it is those who refuse to acknowledge the degree to which attitudes have liberalised over the past decade, and the policy consequences of that.

If attitudes have become more liberal, they have also become more polarised. Conservatives and Leavers are far more concerned about immigration than are Labour supporters and Remainers. The Tories clearly see it as a wedge issue to help win back leavers who have deserted them in the recent period. It is, though, a perilous strategy, not least because even those who agree with Tory policies view them as ineffective. And of all groups, Leavers are most dissatisfied with government policy.

Beyond the fact of its immorality, the Illegal Immigration Bill is also unworkable. There are few “return agreements” allowing irregular migrants to be deported. The Rwanda scheme, if it ever gets off the ground, will accept at most a few hundred asylum seekers. There is currently no other country willing to take Britain’s unwanted. Having created a panic over boat migrants, and having conflated the issues of regular and irregular migration, the Tories may find that people will remember the failure of the “stop the boats” campaign more than the boat people themselves, and be more perturbed by the rise in legal migration than by promises to “take back control”.

The real costs of the government’s theatre of cruelty will be borne not by Conservatives but by migrants, arbitrarily detained and deported and denied their rights, and by the British people whose desire for a fair system is being distorted, whose real problems, from housing to health, are being ignored as migrants are scapegoated, and whose anxieties are being cynically manipulated.

The Illegal Immigration Bill is designed to meet not the “will of the British people” but the Tories’ political needs. And even in that it will fail.