I’ve been detecting that exact same tone too for some years.

The UK is not a place in which foreigners can feel perfectly safe.

Personally, I was met with xenophobic hostility from the beginning, in 2004. I didn’t recognize it for what it was at first. I thought that people were just disorganized (unprofessional) or just plain weird. Thankfully, not everyone was hostile, but by contrast, my experiences in the US were very different. The times were different too, sure, and Donald Trump has not helped and I’ve seen changes in people I used to know in the US too, I’ve seen two of them become more xenophobic, but I doubt that the US is as hostile as the UK these days.