How does the 2015 mainly Syrian refugee crisis affect UK society when the UK gave asylum to these refugees in low numbers? You seem to be conflating EU migration with refugees.
You’re assuming hindsight and that we knew how it would all turn out before it happened.
In 2015 Merkel announced that the Schengen area would have what was an effectively open borders migration policy for anybody who cared to turn up. The problem with that was twofold:
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Germany is not in an area where asylum seekers can reach it without passing through other E.U. countries meaning other EU countries where affected by transient migrants badly.
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Merkel is not an elected E.U. politician. She has only ever been elected inside Germany, people from other countries could not express their disapproval of her actions via democratic means because they can’t vote her in or vote her out.
In 2015 and generally before the referendum, the UK was under great pressure to accept a great number of the migrants Merkel invited. We refused and said instead we intended to take the neediest refugees recommended as such by NGOs straight from the camp in Syria. Sick people, children, those previously slaves for ISIS, the ‘wrong’ religions (Yazidi, Christian, Shia). The number was around 25,000.
Our policy for asylum has worked so well that even Merkel now admits her policy was wrong and ours was right.
Merkel and Germany have continued to bombastically insist other European states take large numbers of the refugees she invited, placing great political and economic burdens on countries who declined.
If the spectre of the referendum and Brexit hadn’t loomed over the E.U. at that time it’s unlikely that we would have been able to refuse or that the rest of the E.U. would have affected the acceptance of that refusal.
It was a genuine concern over EU membership. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.