By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura

New York Times

BOSTON, England >> Workers wearing fluorescent orange clothing picked their way through rows of dark green kale, looking like inmates on a prison farm.

After a long day of labor, which pays the minimum hourly wage, they return to a makeshift camp surrounded by barbed wire and security fences put up by their employer, Staples Vegetables, which supplies supermarkets across Britain and Europe. The pickers, about 1,000 of them, are required to scan their fingerprints before entering the grounds.

Many of these men and women are from Eastern Europe. They are in Britain legally under the European Union’s principle of freedom of movement and labor, which allows any citizen of a European Union nation to work in any other member country.

But their presence has caused anxiety and resentment in Boston, a town on the east coast of England that has come to epitomize this country’s rising antagonism toward immigration. The increasing number of foreigners in the country has become a central issue for voters in the June 23 referendum that will determine whether Britain stays in the European Union.

“There are far too many of them,” said Peter Chamberlain, 61, as he sat on a bench recently and watched two Polish men argue loudly in their native language. “I’d accept being less well-off to get the town back.”

Boston, a town of 67,000, experienced a sixfold increase in foreign-born residents from 2001 to 2011, and the non-British population appears to have continued growing in the last five years, official statistics show. The rapid influx has put a strain on housing, jobs, policing, hospitals and schools, which are scrambling to find more teachers of English.

Given the anxieties in towns like Boston, Prime Minister David Cameron made immigration a central issue in his effort to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union last month.

Unable to alter the principle of freedom of movement, Cameron secured instead a restriction on the benefits that workers from other European Union countries can claim in Britain for four years. He hopes the temporary measure will make Britain a less-attractive destination for Europeans seeking jobs — or at least show British voters that he is responding to their concerns.

Cameron’s efforts to limit benefits, however, are being undermined by a plan put forth by George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce a national living wage that is slightly higher than the current minimum wage, a move that would most likely encourage more people to move to Britain. Starting in April, workers age 25 and over will be paid at least 7.20 pounds (about $10.30) an hour, nearly twice the average minimum wage in the 22 European Union countries that have one.

Supporters of Britain leaving the bloc, or a “Brexit,” say that British jobs are going to immigrants who are willing to work for low wages and are attracted by the chance to claim relatively generous social welfare benefits. Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, though, show that just 7.2 percent of the country’s 5.1 million benefits claimants are not British citizens.

In Boston, both European immigrants and British residents say they are closely following the debate over Britain leaving the European Union.

The community feels “uncertainty, a little fear about the situation,” said the Rev. Stanislaw Kowalski, a priest at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church and chaplain to the Polish community, who is himself an immigrant. Some immigrants are delaying decisions about their lives because they are worried they may need to go back to their native country, Kowalski added.

A number of immigrants said that they agreed with Cameron’s view that immigration had to be controlled. The problem, they said, was Britain’s generous welfare system.

“Britain needs to tidy up the system,” said Gregory Pacho, a Polish-Italian immigrant who owns a taxi company. “It’s pleasant when someone holds your hand, and the system encourages people not to work.”

Boston residents who want to see Britain out of the European Union said they were prepared to give up any of the economic benefits the bloc provides to regain control over immigration.

If Britain leaves the European Union, it could lose full access to the European markets on which agricultural businesses like those in Boston depend.

“It frustrates the hell out of me that we have our hands tied” by the European Union, said Yvonne Stevens, a local councilor and a member of the U.K. Independence Party, which leads one of the two coalitions campaigning for leaving the bloc.

Stevens said she would like to see the freedom of movement replaced by something similar to Australia’s points-based system that requires migrants to have certain skills and qualifications to be eligible for a visa.

Whether Boston would attract skilled jobs under such a system is unclear. The town has historically relied on cheap labor, which is necessary if British consumers want low-priced produce.

And because manual labor like fruit picking faces little competition, resentment is growing over jobs and wages. The oversupply of cheap labor, the argument goes, has limited workers’ negotiating power. In agriculture, for example, the minimum wage for pickers of 6.20 pounds per hour has become a de facto ceiling.

John Ebton, 75, who worked in a pickling factory for 24 years, fondly recalled the days in 1975 when vegetable pickers were paid 3 pounds an hour, about 23 pounds an hour today, adjusted for inflation. “I felt secure that I’d have a job the next day,” he said.

Many Bostonians share Ebton’s reasoning. However, judging the negative effects of immigration by such easy comparisons is naïve, said Christian Dustmann, director of the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London.

Without immigration, he said, British workers in Boston might have lost out in different ways: Local farms could have mechanized part of their labor or shut down altogether, and British supermarkets may have imported cheaper produce.

“There are many jobs that would not have existed without immigration,” he said.

© 2016 The New York Times Company