They didn't want unspecialised poor immigrants from Eastern/Southern Europe and didn't want immigrants / refugees running away from Africa.

They're more than happy to charge thousands to qualified Eastern/Southern European to get them to come here and pocket high salaries and relatively cheap cost of living / taxes (the other place that compares in EU is Switzerland, but it's much more expensive).

Also, they didn't want to pay for poorer countries that will never get their economy together.

The UK was one of the few net contributors to the EU.

"The UK was one of the few net contributors to the EU" -> UK was in very good company as can be found easily here: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-... and it's not difficult to see that the amount of the net contribution is somewhat proportional to the share of the European GDP .

"They didn't want unspecialised poor immigrants from Eastern/Southern Europe" -> the fact is that they were getting a lot of graduated/high specialized immigrants from southern Europe as well.

I don't know if this is 100% true. Part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric is "they're coming here and taking our jobs", which applies just as much to white collar professions as to blue collar ones. Think of all the people in tech who complain about immigrants using H1B visas taking programmer jobs. If you have a zero-sum worldview about how the economy works and how jobs are created, then all immigration is bad, and immigration of people competing with you in the same segment of the labor market is the worst.

Exactly, such kind of thinking is unfortunately very much prevalent outside the big cities, even in developed nations like US and UK.

I guess it is because the folks outside big cities never had a chance to interact with the immigrants and see the value they add to the society, rather than seeing them as a threat. It is quite sad :(

I'm not so sure about that. E.g. there aren't any German truck drivers and trucks anymore, just companies and drivers from eastern europe, because it's cheaper. Similarly for lots of jobs in agriculture, construction and some industries like food processing. That's surprisingly not a problem because of unemployment in Germany as much as it is a social and legal problem: Eastern European workers abroad are underpaid (minimum wage circumvented), uninsured (social security dues circumvented), without appropriate workplace protections (truck drivers doing overtime, illegally having to sleep in their trucks for weeks on end, lax technical safety of the trucks), and draining the economy of their home countries of workers because factories that could have been nearby are in Germany instead.

This begs the question: Would it have been as bad as Brexit to restrict worker movements a little more? I would suggest that such restrictions could have even had an overall benefit if done properly. It's just that Germany desperately wanted those cheap workers.

With the 2004 expansion, Germany (among other states) pressured for restrictions and transitional agreements were made that allowed restricting movement of workers from the newly added countries for up to seven years. The UK was one of the few countries that did not do any of those restrictions, because it's government wanted direct access to cheap labor.

That is true, but changed over time with the changing local political climate. Back in 2004 Angela Merkel was still strictly right-wing anti-immigration, later she drifted more and more left and pro-immigration.

2004 Merkel also wasn't in power. And I think it's relevant, because IMHO the years after 2004 lead to the shift in British public opinion that lead to immigration restrictions becoming such a big topic, and pushing politics towards the referendum.

Is that really true? Truck driver is a recognized trade in Germany, and the number of apprenticeships continues to rise: https://www.eurotransport.de/artikel/bkf-azubis-und-eu-beruf...

I did exaggerate and the problem is also not so simple: https://www.timocom.de/blog/personalmangel-bei-lkw-fahrern

tl;dr: Nobody wants to become a truck driver anymore, even with improving salaries. Higher qualifications and better working conditions might solve the problem in the future.

In the meantime we still need drivers from eastern europe.

Yea and was why May who was pro-EU refused to agree to freedom of movement because she considered the Brexit vote to be a vote primarily againist freedom of movement. Johnson agreed.

And one theory/perspective is that May (with the background of a home secretary) was focused too much on that and drew lines in other sectors without enough consideration for the consequences she then had to try and walk back, which put her always on the defensive against the hardliners, which made a positive framing of a closer-aligned deal impossible. It's fascinating how that shift from "Brexit means a wide range of options and people voted for something of it" to a pile of red lines blocking out a large range of the solution space happened - apparently even to the surprise of members of the government.