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The news that net migration into Britain last year has remained stable at 273,000, with a fall in the proportion of EU citizens compensated by a rise in immigration from the rest of the
world, has prompted much discussion in relation to Brexit. It is now clear that EU migration peaked in 2016 and has been falling steadily ever since. The big increase in non-EU migration to
a quarter of a million has been driven by students arriving from China, India and other Asian countries. With hindsight, we can see that the referendum in effect solved the problem that it
was intended to address: the decision to leave signalled the end of mass migration from the EU. Yet the fact that the UK has continued to attract such huge numbers — the equivalent of Oxford
and Cambridge combined every year — prompts a reflection on the impact of mass immigration on British society. Rural society has been much less affected, but urban Britain has been
transformed beyond all recognition over the past generation. There are two types of urban society: citizen cities and stranger cities. Citizen cities have existed for thousands of years and
first emerge most clearly in the Greek polis, well described by Plato, Aristotle and others. It is from the governance of this kind of urban society that we derive what we call “politics”.
Citizen cities are united by common traditions and customs, a shared history and a solidarity that transcends the individual while respecting individuality. Stranger cities are a
comparatively modern phenomenon. It is less a question of scale —the large metropolis has existed since the empires of the ancient world —than of composition. The ease of mass migration has
made possible cities where the majority of the population are migrants with very little in common. Whereas citizen cities are stable, even static societies, with established hierarchies,
stranger cities are typically protean, dynamic and their social structures are purely functional. Above all, stranger cities are anonymous. This fundamental fact was observed in The Lonely
Crowd which was published as long ago as 1950. In it, the sociologist David Riesman (together with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) divided American society into tradition-directed,
inner-directed and other-directed types. He thought the mainly rural tradition-directed populace had first been overtaken by the inner-directed type who were better adapted to urban life.
Confident and creative, but often also rigid in their outlook, these individuals are what we might now call ‘self-starters’. But they were in turn superseded by the other-directed type, who
were more flexible and hence better adapted to a consumer society. These people took their cues from those around them, but were less autonomous and emotionally self-sufficient. Stranger
cities require an almost unlimited supply of other-directed people. The more anonymous and interchangeable they are, the better. Hence recent immigrants, who are eager to adapt and fit in,
are preferable for most purposes to the more rigid inner-directed type, who is either indifferent to others or expects them to fit into existing structures. Such immigrants are well-suited
to a service economy, which requires their other-directed skills and eagerness to please. However, the inner-directed type may still be dominant at the top of such a society because they are
confident enough to impose their will on their other-directed subordinates. Hence we still see British elites dominated by the products of private schools and ancient universities that
pride themselves on encouraging typically inner-directed personalities. These individuals are confident enough to put down roots anywhere, but they retain a certain rigidity of outlook which
may blind them to the views of other inner-directed people who feel rooted in a particular place. Brexit happened because the “anywheres” ignored the “somewheres”, to adopt David Goodhart’s
widely used distinction. It is often claimed that Britain is a nation of migrants, but that does not make it true. Many, perhaps most, families have at least some ancestry from elsewhere,
and many people now spend at least part of their working lives abroad. Nonetheless, most Britons are still rooted in the country of their birth. They may live in stranger cities, but given
the choice, they move to smaller, less anonymous citizen cities or towns. Mass migration has much deeper effects than those which economists can measure, as the Oxford demographer David
Coleman has pointed out. Not only does it produce losers as well as winners in the labour market, but it marginalises those whose personalities are unsuited to life in stranger cities. Our
public services are increasingly dependent on mass immigration, yet the pressure that such migration places on those same services makes the numbers unsustainable. It may be true that the
vote for Brexit was driven by border anxiety, though that is by no means the same as xenophobia. But the primary motive that most Leavers give, when asked, was the desire to regain control,
including control of our borders. In other words, Brexit is motivated by the question of sovereignty rather than by immigration per se. The persistence of mass migration since the referendum
suggests that those who run the economy have no intention of reducing their dependence on a ready supply of labour from abroad. Yet are we comfortable with the consequences? In other words:
is a society of strangers a society at all?