Time: How Britain Beat America at Immigration

Photo courtesy of Don Roth

It may seem odd given the anti-immigrant backlash that led to Brexit but Jonathan Portes for Time writes about how Britain has become more the “land of immigrants” than the United States.  “In the early 2000s, one in 12 of the British population was born abroad. Now that figure is closer to one in six—higher than even America, the proverbial land of immigrants. And the number is still rising rapidly; over the last two years, almost 2 million people have moved to the U.K.”

How could this be?  Brexit initially led to a more restrictive immigration. “But, nervous about the negative economic consequences of such a move—and hoping to make a reality of `Global Britain’—Boris Johnson’s government made it far easier to permit people from everywhere else to come to the U.K.”  Thus, Britain became more open while the U.S. was tightening its borders under the leadership of Donald Trump.

KJ