Yahoo News Nigel Farage claims immigration not talked about enough during election
Nigel Farage has complained that immigration has not been talked about enough in this general election.
The Brexit Party leader told the i that his speech about immigration yesterday - as opposed to talking about sovereignty - was a deliberate strategy.
His comments came after he told a crowd of supporters in Doncaster that mass immigration is “good for the big employers because they can pay people as little as possible”.
Mr Farage told the i: “I just think it’s not been talked about enough in the election... our view is we should return to a sensible post-war normality.”
An Ipsos Mori poll from September shows that immigration has dropped to being the tenth most important issue facing Britain.
Brexit, the NHS and crime are the top three, followed by education and poverty.
YouGov found that immigration and asylum was the third most important issue to voters in the 2017 election.
The former UKIP leader had told the crowd that quality of life in the UK has “diminished”.
“It may well be that mass immigration is good for the big employers because they can pay people as little as possible, which is what they want after all,” he said to supporters the campaign event.
“But has it been good for our quality of life?”
Mr Farage has constantly criticised immigration policies and suggested yesterday that increases in population had resulted in traffic congestion and difficulties in sorting GP appointments, though he did not back the claim up.
Immigration and freedom of movement in the European Union was seen as one of the driving factors in the outcome of the 2016 referendum.
But it is not just the big companies referenced by Mr Farage that view immigration as a good thing.
A 2018 report by forecaster and analyst group Oxford Economics showed migrants who arrived in 2016 will make a net contribution of £26.9 billion to public finances during their time in the UK.
And a poll released in March by Ipsos Mori found that British people are more positive than negative about immigration.
Mr Farage is targeting Labour seats after standing down Brexit Party candidates the seats the Tories held in 2017.
