Migration to Britain now running above the peaks seen before Brexit. Net migration now back around 300k a year. EU migration down sharply, replace by non-EU migration.

Yet the political salience of migration, which collapsed after Brexit, has not recovered. https://twitter.com/JayLindop_ONS/status/1298911231747686400

Anybody who claims that public concerns about migration reflect raw migration inflows needs to explain why current all time high inflows are not producing much public concern (and indeed are accompanied by the most positive attitudes towards migrants ever recorded).

One rather obvious possibility is that voters do not treat imms as a homogenous mass. The recent rise in migration is driven by student migrants and by non-EU workers with high qualification levels (necessary for a visa). Lots of evidence such imms are positively regarded

Whereas the EU migration which has sharply declined featured a larger share of migrants with few or no qualifications/skills, including many coming to UK to look for work. Polling suggests greater scepticism about this group.

In addition, there is plenty of evidence that voters have never liked free movement policies, which involve surrending national control over immigration. They connect Brexit with the end of such policies (though this hasn't happened yet).

So my hypothesis would be that recent evidence demonstrates that you can have high migration inflows without a public backlash provided voters believe govt controls imm & the inflows skew towards favoured groups (students, high skills, imms coming to fill vacancies)

I think both sides in our political debate make important errors in their thinking about immigration. Conservatives overestimate the importance of getting numbers down and of harsh or cruel enforcement measures to demonstrate "control".

Pro-EU Labourites and Lib Dems underestimate the importance of national control, and of exercising that control through selective migration policies.

Plus of course it is possible that the current situation reflects an unusual political context, where the dominance of COVID, with an absence of the kinds of anti-immigration media stories and political campaigns which would normally accompany high migration

However, that in itself is interesting, because the fact we have very high migration, but the public seems untroubled by it, suggests such campaigns may in some circumstances generate public anxiety rather than being a response to existing anxieties.