British people - Thinking about emigrating...

[Napoléon]

Derail accepted! There are the obviously bigotted, generalised views of immigrants presented by the likes of UKIP, EDL, Britain First, the Daily Mail and others who are the main users of 'scapegoat' tactics: blaming immigrants for the rise in unemployment ("They took our jobs!"), housing problems ("They took our houses!"), welfare costs ("Immigrants claim loads of benefits!"), educational standards ("Immigrants are taking over our classrooms!") and other wildly inaccurate & overly-simplistic, crackpot claims (who can forget that Daily Mail headline "Flights & Buses Full! Romanians head for the UK!" that landed them in front of a tribunal).

Conflating UKIP with the likes of the EDL and Britain First always struck me as a little disingenuous. I don't think you can dump them in the same category and be taken seriously.

All I hear in response to the points UKIP makes are "hurr racists". Not very convincing. Neither are the supposed cries of "they took our jobs". Very few people actually use these arguments and responding to all criticisms of immigration and more importantly, integration, is nothing better than flagrant straw manning.

Then there are the more subtle misrepresentations offered by main-stream politics & media: that immigration costs the country more than it earns, that there's not enough room in the UK to fit all the immigrants, that large proportions of European populations want to emigrate to the UK, the NHS can't cope with the influx, 'Call me Dave's' Calais comments. These are factually inaccurate but more subtle and difficult to find the data on so a surprising number of people think that 'immigration is a problem' in the UK when quite the opposite is true.

Lol, I just read these 'surprising facts'. Sorry to say, none of them were surprising:

1. British workers are British born. No shit.
2. Foreign workers come from everywhere. No shit.
3. Immigration has risen significantly in the last 20 years. Uh, not sure who has the wrong opinion on that, it's actually why people have an issue in the first place. It's why you've seen such a rise in more far-right groups who blame immigration for their problems.
4. Europe's immigration destination: Germany. Yeah, okay, we're still second in the whole of Europe though. Seems another silly 'surprising fact' to me. And the data only shows up to 2013. I wonder if that's still the case. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't.
5. Polish plumbers. Again, Poles are still the 3rd largest group of immigrants to the UK. The biggest of any from the EU. The ordinary Brit has seen a visible influx of Polish people, a lot of Indians and Chinese (I suspect) are more inclined to take 'skilled' jobs. A lot of Poles come to take jobs that have fewer skill requirements, and it's easier for them to come in because of the fact that Poland is in the EU.
6. Why immigrants come, according to them. Oh this one is fucking ridiculous. What immigrant is going to admit that they come here for benefit tourism. You're a smart guy Ben, surely even you can see how stupid this 'surprising fact' is.
7. Benefit recipients. They're mostly British, oh shit, what a surprise. Again, don't think anyone with a brain cell would ever dispute this.
8. Foreign recipients of UK social handouts. Don't even need to talk about this one.
9. Romanians and Bulgarians coming to work. The website says it conflicts with public perception because people think of 'crime' when they hear Bulgarians or Romanians, but strangely, no crime statistics or anything to do with the reasons why people might have such perceptions is contended.

All in all, seems like the only people doing the misrepresenting are websites like this that try to pretend like immigration is all rosey and that people should be "surprised by the real facts". I've gotta be honest, I haven't read such a bullshit article doing as much mental gymnastics in the face of subjective questionnaire data in all my life.

None of which in the article you quoted, actually says anything about whether immigrants really are a factor in some of the issues you mention.

Also, I'm dubious of using the term 'facts' in relation to perceptions of populations and answers given to rather subjective questions.