ALMOST half of Britons believe immigrants are either positive or neutral for the country, said a new global survey.
The YouGov–Cambridge Globalism survey revealed that Britons believed in the benefits of immigration more than its European neighbours.
About 28 per cent of Britons believed the benefits of immigration outweighed the costs compared with 24 per cent in Germany, 21 per cent in France and 19 per cent in Denmark.
The survey also suggested men were most open to the benefits of immigration. Thirty two per cent said the overall impact of immigration was positive, compared with 24 per cent of women.
Sunder Katwala, the director of the identity and integration thinktank British Future, was quoted as saying by the Guardian that studies show Britain was on the “glass half full” end of the debate.
“There’s an increasing body of evidence that attitudes, having been very sceptical, are becoming softer,” he said. “The salience of immigration has dropped significantly and there’s also been a warming up of attitudes.”
“There’s a lot of nuance in British attitudes. The nuance was missing in the last 10 years because we were having a debate about ‘are we able to talk about immigration or not?’,” he added.
“It’s now a debate about what we should do now. Some people accept changes are coming. Some people are more empathetic because they see stories like Windrush, they see that the 3 million Europeans in the UK aren’t just a statistic but the people we see on television worried about whether they’re allowed to stay.”
Apsana Begum
