Brexit and migration

In 2016 a majority of British voters voted for the UK to leave the European Union. Many of these voters based their vote on a desire to reduce immigration and a belief that Brexit would contribute to this aim. In the period after the referendum, when the future terms of the UK’s relationship to the EU were negotiated, the vote was read as a mandate to disintegrate from the commitments to EU migration policy. This paper explores the discursive linkage of migration and European integration in the debates on Brexit by asking how salient the linkage has been and how the issues have been connected. It finds that the discursive linkage radically shifted after the referendum in terms of how authority was allocated with regards to the EU, to a greater extent decoupling the issues. The discursive linkage also changed during the negotiation period as other issues than immigration entered the discourse, the perceptions of authority were more unclear, the linkage was made with reference to other groups of migrants and the positions on migration were more positive.