Who blames Brexit for their decision to leave the UK? The departure of skilled Germans from Britain after the referendum

ABSTRACT

Brexit created uncertainty for migrants living in the UK and a potential reason to leave the country. Some of the consequences of the Brexit referendum, such as the loss of skilled workers, may have been unintended. This article investigates the relevance of Brexit for German migrants who decided to return to Germany from the UK in the two years following the 2016 referendum. Our analysis relies on a register-based probability sample of German migrants. We find that more than half of German migrants from the UK assert that their decision to return was strongly affected by Brexit. Furthermore, Brexit as a motive for returning positively correlates to dissatisfaction with the political situation, the lack of social security, and dissatisfaction with life in the country as other reasons for their return. Our results indicate that skills and the Brexit return motive are positively related. Whereas attachment to the UK does not affect whether German migrants blame Brexit for their return, those with better English skills and longer durations of stay are more likely to mention Brexit as a return motive.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• migration decisions
• skilled migrants
• return migration
• EU mobility
• freedom of movement

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Andreas Ette, Heiko Rüger, Nikola Sander, Andreas Genoni, Jonas A. Weik, and to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Replication files

Stawarz, and Witte, (2023) CODE: Who blames Brexit for their decision to leave the UK? The departure of skilled Germans from Britain after the referendum (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7680106

Notes

1 We refer to the campaign organisations ‘Vote Leave’ and ‘Leave.EU’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018).

2 Some do identify migrants who realised their return, but these studies use qualitative data (Godin and Sigona 2022; Zontini and Genova 2022).

3 Survey data are available here: https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13750

4 These include all EU15 countries minus Germany and the United Kingdom; that is Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, and Sweden.

5 We used multiple imputations to deal with missing values. For our analytical sample of UK return migrants we imputed all missing values based on the information of the regression analysis (Table 2) and with other migration motives as auxiliary variables. The estimates based on the imputed data were very similar to those displayed in Table 2 and lead to the same conclusions.

6 The items were part of an item-battery introduced as follows: ‘There are many potential reasons for moving back to Germany. The following list mentions several motives for moving to Germany. Please indicate to what extent these reasons were important for your decision to move to Germany.’

7 It is common practice to split only the extreme categories (1–4 vs 5, 6), thus obtaining similar group sizes. We also used correlations to analyse how the Brexit motive is related to other migration motives. Moreover, we contrasted persons who have rated the importance of the Brexit was not important (response categories 1, 2) with those that stated the Brexit was very important (response categories 5, 6). Both additional analysis lead to the same conclusion as drawn from those presented in the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [grant no 345626236].

Notes on contributors

Nico Stawarz

Nico Stawarz is senior researcher at the Federal Institute for Population Research. His research focuses on the development of different forms of spatial mobility and their determinants as well as on the effects of spatial mobility, for example on wages, subjective well-being, health or social inequalities. His research has been published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Health and Place, Population, Space and Place, and Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Nils Witte

Nils Witte is visiting professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and on leave from the Federal Institute for Population Research. His research interests lie at the intersection of international migration and social inequality. His research has been published in European Sociological Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, and Social Science Computer Review.