Andrew Vine: It wasn't EU law that opened the door to migrants

Just how hollow was underlined by last week’s deal with France in which Britain agreed to take in more of the migrants besieging Calais – and pay £44m towards maintaining border controls.

This wasn’t the sort of deal the blue-collar, Labour-supporting areas that swung the referendum in favour of leaving the EU had in mind.

Put another way, the reality of dealing with immigration is turning out to be a very different matter from what many imagined would be a robust and long-overdue refusal to let more people into Britain, accompanied by the sound of a door being slammed.

Sooner or later, those who believed leaving the EU was the way to control immigration are going to wake up to the fact that they effectively voted for a myth.

Because it wasn’t treacherous European so-called friends that caused Britain’s problems and anxieties over immigration. It was us.

For those who backed Brexit, concern at the influx of people from overseas trumped everything else. Even the downright, but persuasive, lie about leaving resulting in an extra £350m a week for the NHS paled beside it.

There were even those who fooled themselves into thinking that a vote for Brexit would mean thousands of people already here being told that they were no longer welcome.

Such relatively lofty concerns as the influence of the European Court of Justice on our own laws, or the assertion that Britain would do better as an independent trading nation, did not matter compared to immigration. Mutterings of “they’re taking all our jobs” were the soundtrack to the vote.

No matter that the NHS, now creaking in the face of a winter crisis, would collapse without the foreign-born staff that make up almost a third of its workforce. Nor that employers often prefer hard-working new arrivals to bone-idle Britons who won’t apply for jobs.

How many of those who voted leave feel cheated now, with no realistic prospect of a substantial cut in the number of people coming to Britain?

Not much more than a year from our scheduled departure from the EU, we are no nearer addressing legitimate concerns over immigration.

Nor has any real headway been made on striking a sensible balance between the needs of public services and industry for migrant workers with the social consequences of allowing too many people in.

A whole new backlash against the Government is coming over immigration from those voters who wanted the issue tackled, instead of avoided as it had been by both Conservatives and Labour over decades.

There has been a fall in the number of migrants since the vote for Brexit, but only because the economy has suffered a 13 per cent depreciation of the pound’s value against the euro, making Britain a less attractive place to head for.

But 230,000 migrants still arrived in the year to June 2017. That’s more than the entire population of York, and there is no reason to suppose numbers will be any lower this year.

It was never the EU that created the seemingly uncontrolled immigration that disturbed so many voters. It was our own politicians, who we elected to office freely and fairly.

They were the culprits who allowed communities to be swamped by huge numbers of incomers without sufficient thought being given, or resources allocated, to integrating them.

And it was that same political class which so neglected proper checks that Britain lost track of how many people were arriving, or where they were ending up.

The voters who blamed the EU were looking in the wrong direction. Far from encouraging Britain throw open its borders to all and sundry, the EU gave us the means to limit numbers. And we didn’t use them.

Britain chose not to take advantage of the powers agreed in 2004 to limit the arrival of workers from the raft of eastern European states which had just joined the EU.

Almost every other EU country took the sensible precaution of placing limits on migration, until each could gauge the likely scale of new arrivals and their impact. We just threw the doors open.

Twenty years were spent effectively not knowing who was here because exit checks on immigrants were abandoned. That meant no accurate picture of who had left and who was staying, even illegally.

Brexit shows no signs of doing anything to quell the angst over immigration felt by many.

The deal with France is just the first of what are likely to be many more compromises. Those who believed they were voting for a clampdown on immigration are starting to find out they were misled.