How Immigration Fears in the U.K. Are Fueling Support for an E.U. Exit

Home - David Kirby has had enough. At 71, the retired electrician and lifelong Londoner doesn’t like the way England is changing.

“The country has had it with everything,” he says over a pint on a December day at a J.D. Wetherspoon pub in southeast London. “The way they are letting everybody in, it is too much. It is overloaded now. There are too many foreigners in the country.”

Like many who are broadly opposed to immigration here, Kirby thinks Britain should leave the European Union—and soon, he’ll get the chance to vote for it, in a referendum likely to be held late in 2016. Prime Minister David Cameron pledged in 2013 to put the country’s membership to a vote in part to solidify support on his right flank in the build-up to this year’s general election — though he has said he favors staying in the union under certain terms.

The possibility that Britain might decide to leave the E.U.—dubbed “Brexit”—is as dominant in the British press as the Republican primary is in the U.S., and has eclipsed the rest of Cameron’s agenda. Thursday marks a turning point in that debate as the prime minister travels to Brussels for a summit with the European Union heads of state, in hopes that he can make progress in negotiations over E.U. reforms that he thinks will keep his country in the union. Cameron has said that if the E.U. can agree to his proposed reforms before a summit in February, he will campaign to convince the British people to remain in the E.U. If it does not, he has threatened to campaign for Britain to leave — an outcome that could be a mortal blow to a union already battered by economic headwinds and a historic migrant crisis.

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