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The committee said the threshold of £29,000 was already high compared to other high-income countries it had looked at.

“No number of military bases or other goodies is going to make up for having a disproportionately large number of high-income people,” Bill Ahearn, then the director of policy for the Tax Foundation, told me in 2010.

They are a mix of low, middle and high-income countries and those with low and high fertility.

Among the strongest supporters were Democrats, with 91% support, as well as middle- and high-income earners, and those who lived in the Bay Area.

The Migration Observatory said a 10-year route to settlement would make the UK more restrictive than most other high-income countries but comparable to Switzerland and Japan.