You could have made a lot of money last June if you had bet on Brexit — British exit from the European Union — to have prevailed in the United Kingdom’s June 23 referendum. The polls showed a close race, but the odds at betting shops reflected the view — widespread in elite financial, media and political circles in London — that more Britons would vote Remain rather than Leave. And they did — in London. But not in the rest of the nation. Overall Brexit won by a 52 to 48 percent margin.
How did it happen? The fullest account, I am assured by British political friends, is Tim Shipman’s book All Out War: How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class, which amazon.co.uk tells me will arrive tomorrow. For a shorter — although not that much shorter, it seems as you’re in the middle of reading it — is Dominic Cumming’s long article in the British Spectator on why Leave won. Cummings has been a controversial figure in Britain, head of a group that in 1999-2004 lobbied public opinion against Britain adopting the euro currency (as Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown cannily prevented), and a top aide to Michael Gove when he was education secretary in Prime Minister David Cameron’s government in 2010-14. Cummings returned to political activity as the head of Vote Leave, which against the wishes of UKIP leader Nigel Farage became the official backer of the Leave side.
Cummings argues strenuously that Brexit’s victory was contingent and might easily have been prevented if other people (named) were in charge of its campaign or if those on the other side (also named) had made shrewder moves. He gives himself credit for keeping Vote Leave on the right track and gives three leading Parliamentarians — Michael Gove, former London Mayor and now Foreign Minister Boris Johnson and German-born Labour MP Gisela Stuart — even more for putting a respectable and intellectually serious face on the arguments for Brexit. Those interested in more detail should certainly, as Glenn Reynolds of instapunit.com says, read the whole thing.
One thing in Cummings’s article struck me as particularly relevant to what is going on in the United States now. And that is that one of the strongest arguments for Brexit was that it would allow Britain to imitate “the Australian points system.” That is the Australian policy — Canada has a similar one — of giving priority to high-skill immigrants, people with demonstrated skills and educational achievements, knowledge of the national language (English in Australia and the U.K., English or French in Canada), etc. Cummings: “Long before there was any prominent media discussion of ‘the Australian points system’ you could hear it being discussed in focus group after focus group to an extent that was very surprising to me and was very surprising to every single person I discussed it with, including Farage (who adopted the policy because of focus groups — the causal chain was not: Farage talks, focus groups respond).”
So that point was included in the message that Vote Leave delivered, mostly through social media rather than traditional British billboards and TV ads. As Cummings summarizes it, “Vote Leave to take back control of immigration policy. If we stay there will be more new countries like Turkey joining and you won’t get a vote. Cameron says he wants to ‘pave the road’ from Turkey to here. That’s dangerous. If we leave we can have democratic control and a system like Australia’s. It’s safer to take back control.”
I have frequently argued that we should shift our immigration system from the current preference for low-skill immigrants (primarily through extended family reunification) to a preference for high-skill immigrants, as in Canada and Australia. In a week-after-election Washington Examiner column, I pointed to “the little-noticed tenth of Trump’s ten points in his [August 31] Phoenix speech: shifting legal immigration from extended-family reunification, mostly of low-skill immigrants, and setting aside many more places for high-skill immigrants” based on merit, skill and proficiency.
“That resembles the point systems of Canada and Australia. As law professor F. H. Buckley points out, Canada, with one-tenth the U.S. population, admits about 160,000 immigrants yearly under economic categories — more than the U.S.’s 140,000. As a result, immigrants in Canada, unlike here, have incomes above, not below the national average.
“Some serious Democrats agree with Trump. ‘Our immigration laws should be reoriented to favor immigrants with higher skills,’ wrote Clinton administration policymaker William Galston in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 2. Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers called for more high-skill immigration in an American Enterprise Institute talk Nov. 4.”
Are voters in America as familiar with Canada’s and Australia’s high-skill immigration systems? I doubt it — but Cummings doubted the Australian points system was unknown in Britain until he starting hearing about it repeatedly in focus groups. Certainly the Canadian and Australian system would become much more familiar in America if a widely recognized political leader newly ensconced in Washington made frequent reference to them.
It strikes me that there could be an opening here for President Trump to champion, as the highest-visibility part of new immigration system, a preference for high-skill immigrants. This would have the advantage of placing him in the position of not just saying whom we should keep out but emphasizing whom we would let in. He could point to the success and popularity of the systems in Canada and Australia and say that we can do even better in our efforts to — how shall I phrase it? — make America great again.
It would have the advantage of having at least some bipartisan appeal. It might irritate the high-tech CEOs who like getting H-1B visas for high-skill immigrants who are then tied to their firms, but pushing around CEOs is something Trump seems willing to do, and they can be mollified by the promise that a high-skill system could give them many more high-skill immigrants to recruit. And he could tell his constituency of people who believe they have been hurt by an oversupply of low-skill immigrants that he is acting on their behalf, even at the risk of giving the high-skill Americans they resent a dose of healthy competition in the marketplace.
I have known Cummings for some years and believe his record is worthy of respect. Britain kept the pound and never entered the euro, to its great and obvious benefit. Michael Gove’s education reforms have established hundreds of “academies” similar to American charter schools and made them effectively permanent, by creating a constituency for them which will make them hard to abolish. And Britain voted for Brexit — contrary to President Obama’s advice and in line with Trump’s — and Prime Minister Theresa May, whom Trump is welcoming to the White House Friday, is following through on it. I don’t expect the president to read Cummings’s very long article, but it contains a lesson he might find profitable.
