workers who currently harvest the crops, clean the hotel rooms, and care for the sick

and elderly in
Britain.

But the question looms: Is May looking in the rearview mirror, while the public has largely moved on?

In the days before the Brexit vote — amid a surge of migration to Europe from the Middle East and
North Africa, and while the booming British economy was attracting a huge wave of workers from
Eastern Europe — the pollster YouGov found that 56 percent of people named “immigration and
asylum” as the top issue facing the country. Last month, the figure was 27 percent.

A second major polling firm, Ipsos-MORI, reported a similar drop in respondents citing immigration
as “the most important issue facing Britain today” — from 48 percent in June 2016 to 17 percent
in October.

That’s an extraordinary plunge, say polling experts — and it’s mirrored by parallel surveys and focus
group studies done for academics, advocacy groups and the E.U.

“It’s really quite striking,” said Lindsay Richards, a sociologist at the University of Oxford who has
written on the topic for the Migration Observatory, an independent research group.

Manchester University’s Ford said that when people listed immigration as a top concern before the
Brexit vote, it tended to reflect anti-immigrant sentiment, not worries about how asylum seekers
pouring into Europe were being treated.

“I have data sets where you can see literally verbatim what is said. In all caps, people write, ‘TOO
MANY IMMIGRANTS,’ or ‘TOO MANY EUROPEANS,’ or ‘WHY CAN’T THEY STOP THE
IMMIGRANTS?’ over and over again,” said Ford. “It’s no mystery what side they are on.”

Britain today still has high rates of immigration. But migration to Europe from North Africa has
dropped to pre-surge levels. Net migration from the E.U. to Britain peaked around 189,000 the year
before the Brexit vote. The latest figures show that it’s around 87,000, meaning that it has more than
halved in two years.

Polls still find broad support for reducing the overall number of newcomers. Surveys also find
respondents divided over whether immigration — and multiculturalism — is good or bad for “British
culture.”

But since the Brexit vote, fewer people tell pollsters that there are too many immigrants in the United
Kingdom. Britons also have become more positive about the ideas that “immigration is good for the
economy” and that the United Kingdom should “allow more E.U. workers.”