By Ian Hamilton

WITH the rise of UKIP and the frequency of Nigel Farage on the nation's television screens, voters might have thought controlling immigration was one of the nation’s hot topics when deciding who gets their backing on May 7.

Voters might also have thought the subject would have arisen in Darlington parliamentary candidates’ pitches to win the seat in the House of Commons. It hasn’t.

So is this an important issue for the people of Darlington? And if it isn’t, what are voters considering when they go to ballots in a fortnight’s time.

On Friday afternoon I was determined to find out. So I wandered the hustle and bustle of the town centre, asking people how important the issue of immigration is to them when deciding where to place their cross on the ballot paper.

Making my way up to a balmy High Row, I met Michael Lawson, a 79 year-old Salvation Army volunteer who was more than willing to share his views.

“It’s not an issue to me,” he said, at the same time as voicing a genuine concern for the plight of immigrants recently drowned in the Mediterranean. To Michael, a party who looks after the NHS would be more likely to get his vote.

“They need to be supported as far as I’m concerned. Immigrants are going to come anyway.”

Next to speak was Gail Wiper, a 59 year-old retired teacher from Darlington.

“It does make me think about the way I vote, yes,” she said. “I’m not a UKIP person, though. I’ve no time for them at all.

“I think we do have to have some restrictions on who comes in,” she said, pointing out that UK citizens wanting to work abroad often face tougher restrictions than those wishing to emigrate here.

“My children have all tried to move abroad and have been really restricted, but we don’t seem to have restrictions on it here.

“If [a political party] say we’re just going to let anybody in then I would probably vote against them, but if there were going to be some restrictions and I agreed with what they were saying, then I would vote for them.” In the end she decided that the NHS – her elderly mother suffers from dementia - education and immigration were her top three priorities and expressed respect for immigrants who come to work.

“Polish people… I taught a lot of them… they’re coming to work so I don’t have a problem with that,” she said.

Later I met a first-time voter, Steven Nicholson, 18, a student of games design, who said that he hadn’t given the issue of immigration much thought, but what did affect him were tuition fees.

“Ideally I would prefer them lowered…that would be my main thing – and what I actually get for my tuition fees.”

Only the second person from his family to go to university, Steven added: “I don’t think you can put a limit on who comes into the country or not. People would start to feel victimised.”

Employment and the NHS were more important than immigration for Julie and Stephen Waite, a couple from Darlington. Their seriously ill daughter struggled to be seen quickly by doctors, making the NHS more important than ever to them.

“The NHS is really struggling. They’re getting really slated for [waiting] times and paperwork. If they weren’t tied down that way, perhaps they could move more freely,” said Stephen.

Julie added: “I think employment and health are more important – and education. Immigration is still a problem but I think other things are more important.”

The afternoon was almost up as shoppers thinned along High Row and the town clock told me it was time to be heading home. But passing the bus stop on Tubwell Row I bumped into Mehfoos Yacoob, a 24 year-old graduate engineer. He told me he had arrived in the UK from India in 2009 to attend university. Would immigration affect how he was going to vote?

“It’s a fairly important issue,” he said. “If I were to make a decision between the three main parties, the differences between their views on immigration is definitely something that’s important to me.”

Mehfoos explained how a political party’s ideas on immigration would have to be firmly rooted in facts, and that such a data-driven policy’s effects on the economy would have to be considered before he would vote for them.

“I don’t think we should follow any particular ideology. I think we should follow the data,” reflected the immigrant from Kerala, Southern India.

I was left feeling that Darlington’s parliamentary candidates had probably got it just about right by not placing much emphasis on immigration in their electoral campaigns. Getting the NHS and education sorted out seem far more important to local people – if this unscientific pool is anything to go by.