A new polling technique and new data: the latest on immigration views

Welcome to the 102nd edition of The Week in Polls, which returns to immigration. With the issue so central to the government’s political and policy plans, does the latest polling tell us anything different from the picture painted previously?

Then it’s a look at the latest voting intention polls followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

But first I wonder if any reader knows the origin of that favourite quote used by those behind in the polls, “The only poll that matters is the general election”? Sky’s Jon Craig recently credited it to Margaret Thatcher, but I don’t think that is right as a 1970 Conservative campaign guide credits it to Harry Truman. However, that also doesn’t seem right as others don’t attribute it to the US President, and The Times guide to the 1970 general election credits it to Ted Heath. Anyone got a better or earlier source?

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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What does the latest polling on immigration tell us?

Is it about illegal immigration?

Sam Freedman’s excellent newsletter recently carried a typically thoughtful piece about an enticing new polling technique. Yet for all the excellence of Sam’s writing and all the excitement of what that technique can bring, in the end I feel that what it mainly shows us is the limitations of what polling can reveal.

Here’s the tool and what Sam Freedman did with it:

My friends at Focaldata have designed a cool new tool that I’ve been allowed to experiment with. It uses an AI chatbot to conduct 30 min interviews with voters based on prompts I gave it, but asking its own follow-ups based on responses. This has the potential to give far more nuanced insight than a standard poll at a fraction of the cost of using a human interviewer. Unlike a focus group it avoids the danger of the most extrovert members dominating conversation or influencing others and it can be done at scale in a few hours.

We got 100 people who voted Conservative in 2019 to take part, I wanted to focus on this group as they are the ones driving the political conversation. The response was great, people interacted as they would with a person (they knew they were talking to an AI) and gave detailed answers.

As a tool, this has exciting potential to give the advantages of focus group insight but with a volume of participants that guards against the risk of the very small size of focus groups making them not typical of the views of others. It could turn out to be the best of both worlds of polling and focus groups, cost-effective and quick too. Or it could turn out to be the worst of both. For the moment, though, let’s be polling techno-optimists.

What did the tool tell us about views on immigration? Here’s what:

The key themes were a belief that if immigrants were willing to pay tax and contribute to society then they should be welcomed, and a connected, but separate, concern about shortages of important skills – with doctors the most common example…

Only a small minority of people cited the overall number of migrants – legal and illegal – as unmanageable, and just a couple used figures (correct ones) about net migration…

The Timothy/Johnson view that rising concern about immigration arises from spontaneous awareness of higher numbers does not, on the basis of these responses, seem likely. If that was driving concern we would be seeing more worry about legal migration, which is the primary source of higher numbers. Nor did many respondents give examples of the way migration has harmed them personally. The worries were generalised and heavily focused on small boats, which have, of course, been the focus of most political and media discussion.

So far, so good, at least if you’re a liberal: even for these 2019 Conservatives, the real issue is illegal rather than legal immigration and so, the logic would suggest, tackle illegal immigration and it’s job done.

But… as the extract quoted above mentions, very few people cited accurate data on the level of illegal immigration (and other evidence suggests people are not great at estimating its extent accurately).

That should cause a pause for thought. What would actually happen if a government had dramatic success in tackling illegal immigration?

Perhaps there would be widespread public happiness. Or perhaps people who previously said that it was only illegal immigration which really bothered them would discover (or admit) that after all, their views weren’t really just about illegal immigration. (Or indeed, perhaps not really about immigration at all.)

That possibility - that there’s a tension between contradictory views held by the same people both saying it’s illegal immigration that bothers them but then also not being satisfied if it is tackled - is plausible because we do know of another, widely held, set of contradictory views on immigration. It’s that there’s a good chunk of people who both say that immigration is too high and also, when asked one by one about the different groups which make up that total, say that it isn’t too high for most of them and even saying they’d be happy for some to rise. Overall they want immigration lower, but when you get into specifics, their answers don’t add up to lower immigration.

On both questions - legal versus illegal, overall picture versus specific picture - polling and focus groups can help define the shape of the contradictory views. But, even with clever new tools, it can’t tell us what the outcome will be when those contradictions are put to the test. Trying to understand that, and what to do about it, is a matter for political judgement and leadership.

As is the existential question: which, if either, of a pair of contradictory views is the real one that a democracy should aim to satisfy? Politicians, and even philosophers are needed. Not just pollsters.

Record dissatisfaction with government on immigration

Turning to more traditional polling, there is new data from Ipsos for British Future. It finds:

Public dissatisfaction with the Government’s handling of immigration is at its highest level since before the EU referendum … Some 69% of the public say they are dissatisfied with the way the current government is dealing with immigration and just 9% are satisfied. Only 16% of current Conservative supporters – and just 8% of those who voted Conservative in 2019 – are satisfied with the government’s handling of the issue.

Why? It’s back to the issue of illegal immigration being central:

Reasons for dissatisfaction vary according to people’s politics. The number one reason given is ‘not doing enough to stop channel crossings’, chosen by 54% of those who are dissatisfied, with 51% also saying it is because ‘immigration numbers are too high’.

Yet 28% of those dissatisfied say it’s because of ‘creating a negative or fearful environment for migrants who live in Britain’ and for 25% the reason is ‘not treating asylum seekers well’.

Echoing the point I made above, when people get into the details support for lower immigration often melts away:

Even those who want lower numbers find it difficult to identify what migration they would cut. Almost half of the 337,240 work visas granted in 2023 were ‘Skilled Worker – Health and Care’ visas. The tracker finds that 51% of the public would like the number of doctors coming to the UK from overseas to increase (24% remain the same, 15% decrease); 52% would like the number of migrant nurses to increase (23% remain the same, 15% decrease) and 42% would like more people coming to the UK from overseas to work in care homes (27% remain the same, 18% decrease).

For a range of other working roles, support for not reducing immigration numbers is higher than that for reducing them. Less than 3 in 10 people support reducing numbers of seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers, construction labourers, restaurant & catering staff, teachers, academics, computer experts and lorry drivers coming to the UK. When allocating work visas for immigration, the public would prefer the government to prioritise migration to address shortages at all skill levels (52%) than attracting people for highly skilled roles (26%).

Support for reducing the number of international students coming to the UK has increased by 4 points, with around a third of people (35%) preferring numbers to be reduced. But most of the public (53%) does not want to reduce student numbers. A third would prefer numbers to remain the same (34%) and a further fifth (19%) would like to see them increase.

And the electoral impact of this?

When we do finally go to the polls later this year, will this be an ‘immigration election’? Only for a minority. Around half of Conservatives (53%) say the issue is important in deciding how they will vote in the coming election, but it still comes after after the NHS (57%) and cost of living (55%) as their third most important issue. For Labour voters immigration ranks 12th in importance, with half as many saying it matters in deciding their vote (27%).

A contrary view

Finally, there’s a piece from James Johnson, former pollster to Theresa May, that has a rather different take.¹

A good point it makes is that there are two different ways of interpreting what people mean when they say they want immigration to stay the same. Both illustrious people like Rob Ford and more obscure people like myself have often added together those saying they are happy for immigration to rise with those happy for it to stay the same, and contrasted those numbers with the number wanting immigration to fall.

Whether you allocate the ‘stay the same’ crowd to the pro or anti immigration camp makes quite a difference to the overall picture:

Graph used by James Johnson, drawing on data from UK in a Changing Europe.

Other than the first two categories, the ‘stay the samers’ are the key swing group determining which camp is largest.

But should those who say they want immigration - either overall or for specific groups - to stay the same be counted as opponents of cuts to immigration?

James Johnson argues not, because:

Immigration numbers are not “staying the same”. They have not for years, and have increased rapidly since the pandemic to new highs. Though immigration changes have been announced by the government, there is likely to be a surge of visa applications before these take effect next year. Immigration is not staying the same, nor falling.

In other words, those who want immigration to stay the same should be counted as wanting action to be taken to reduce (and indeed abolish) the increases taking place.

Rob Ford’s own response to the piece was:

Interesting piece from James. He’s been pretty strident in his criticism of my chart from earlier this week. I don’t agree with all of it but I do agree the data I presented is open to more than one interpretation. I think mine is defensible but I also think his is too…

I’d put it this way: record high immigration has not generated widespread demands for swinging cuts to most migrant flows, even when voters are presented with the (very large) raw numbers. But nor do the public support further rises.

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National voting intention polls

The spread in support levels for the Conservatives from different pollsters continues to be quite wide. It’s nine points at the moment (18%-27%) but even that highest figure comes with a Labour lead deep into double digits (15%).

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

The problem with opinion poll averages.

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How different MRPs compare, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.