Popular hostility toward immigrants is determined by the perceived big picture, which polling data also shows most people get badly wrong. These errors are not neutral. The fact that people greatly overestimate the proportion of immigrants who are asylum seekers, for instance, matters largely because of the culture of suspicion and disbelief about refugees. It is hard to see how this could not be prejudiced.

Popular hostility toward immigrants is determined by the perceived big picture, which polling data also shows most people get badly wrong. These errors are not neutral. The fact that people greatly overestimate the proportion of immigrants who are asylum seekers, for instance, matters largely because of the culture of suspicion and disbelief about refugees. >It is hard to see how this could not be prejudiced.

Among defenders of immigration, whether liberal or left, there is a reluctance to confront the prospect of mass, popular racism. For example, John Harris is not untypical in arguing that anxiety over immigration is not racist but a response to desperate day to day experience produced by mass migration. Experience has little to do with it. Most Britons have been hostile to immigration for decades, long before the waves of EU migration in the last decade. What has changed now is the political salience of this hostility.

Another tendency is to acknowledge racism only to treat it as the result of elite or right wing misdirection exploiting people’s real concerns. If this was the case, it would be enough to expose “Ukip lies” as Nick Clegg attempted to do in debating Farage. But he was mauled. That’s because the dodgy “facts” were mere supports for a wider morality fable according to which Brits are cheated by mass immigration. People believe the fable, so they accept the facts.  Read More