This is definitely the biggest surprise for me about Brexit.<p>Given how loudly the politicians talked about it, given how loudly the press talk about it, given how negative so many comments still are about it even today, I had assumed that the UK was broadly in consensus with wanting less of it.<p>I can see the same dynamics in the USA today — for all the negative talk about illegal immigrants, they're so economically useful it would be a disaster for the USA to actually remove them, yet the talk remains. So, will the US do the same, keep complaining even as they bring in more needed immigrants?<p>And conversely, I wonder what will happen if and when we finally do get useful humanoid robots. Even assuming the robots need remote control and don't have AI, and those remote workers connect from another country, how will people react to this — will they react like loom-smashers from 1811, or will they treat it as immigrant labour taking their jobs, or will they frame it as per current discussion on imports-and-tariffs?