OK User and Slightofhand. I will bite:
"I have been a migrant from the U.K. to a non-EU country and it's a completely different board game. No recourse to public funds or benefits, no healthcare and you get deported if made redundant or sacked."
In Ireland now and even as an EU immigrant I am not entitled to anything. I am especially not entitled to anything because my non-EU spouse can only be with me for three months and I need a job after that. If I didnt have a job DP would be asked to leave. No NHS in Ireland either. And, despite the Daily Mail hate, EU citizens cant just come to claim benefits (its odd really, they come to claim benefits and steal peoples jobs - how does that work?).
"Break the law and your visa is cancelled."
Same in UK.
"Consequently, the population in my adopted country was very pro-immigration because they knew that it only added to their economy."
The reverence that the Rivers of Blood speech is held kind of hints that even when UK immigration was about economics, there was a very high degree of hate.
"They also knew that only highly qualified people needed to fulfil roles got in."
Yet immigration in the UK is now about every person. See my highly qualified spouse.
Many of those things of which people are most proud in this country - social welfare and the NHS, for example - increase the attractiveness of the U.K. to lower-skilled/paid migrants.
Indeed. But the fact we speak English is also a solid attraction. We also have employment legislation that prevents wide scale exploitation. We also have a solid economy where there are jobs for those who want to work hard and dont feel that jobs are below them. And entitlements are not universal nor are they automatic cause somewhere is here.
"I am from a white working class background and tbh if the inability to get a school place for your kid or a GP appointment coincides with an influx of new arrivals, it's not hard to see why many people are a bit pissed off."
And where does this happen? Where is the planning and public spending so overrun with immigrants? No acknowledgement of the failure of government to spend on public services? No recognition that services are in decline regardless of who lives in certain places.
"Magnanimity is easier when you are in (say) the West coast of Scotland looking out over countryside than when watching all the green space in your town be concreted for housing estates."
Plenty of house estates being built in Scotland. Strangly, most of them are for Scots. No new towns are being built to house immigrants. We, as a nation, have a growing population that isnt based on influxes of people coming off boats every other day.
"It's also easier when you can afford to insulate yourself from the less desirable effects of population increases (private education, skilled work so less wage deflation, buying in a "nice" area, private healthcare etc). I suspect many MN'ers fall into this category."
Perhaps but in Scotland I lived in a housing estate in a former mining village. In Dublin were are, at the moment, in a glorified bedsit. We arent insulated from much. Oh, and wage delflation isnt a thing according to academics but that is sectorial wide. I suppose costs have changed for some. E.g. Why do you want the single parent to go back to paying stunningly high call out charges for a plumber? That stopped for me when EU plumbers at least came and looked before deciding what to bill me. So who gets your sympathy - the plumber or the lone parent?
"FWIW DH is a non-white,non-EU immigrant who immigrated to the U.K. on a highly skilled migrant programme. He has been subjected to more checks because he is non-EU e.g. regular English tests, even though he was educated at a British school overseas, in English. Despite working for the NHS he could not stay here or claim benefits for many years even though he was a HR taxpayer. His EC colleagues - many of whom have faltering English - are not tested because EU law does not allow this."
My DP is the same for a lot of that. Mind you, DP has also spent a considerable amount of time correcting the written English in work reports, written by people who were born and educated here.
"He voted leave (!) because he thinks the UK should be free to choose the workers it needs from anywhere rather than be forced to take all-comers from within the EU. I find it quite hard to argue with that."
The UK was always free to choose. France or Germany or Poland did not tell the UK how many people it could take from India or Pakistan. That is a really odd argument.
My DP would have voted to stay. Because people like Farage stood in front of posters that echoed Nazi propaganda and made race baiting claims about Turkey. Being a fellow traveller with racists and xenophobes was not something that was appealing. I find it quite hard to argue with that.