1900–1960s
The first half of the 20th century was one of low immigration except for crises created by the two world wars.
World War I. During the War anti-German feeling in Britain erupted into violent incidents and large numbers of Germans and Austrians were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ (see ‘Germanophobia’). Meanwhile, a quarter of a million Belgian refugees were welcomed to Britain temporarily, most returning home after the war. Many white merchant seamen were drafted into the armed forces and replaced by migrant seamen who formed the majority of many of the merchant crews on Atlantic convoys. In 1919 tension between returning white servicemen and ‘coloured’ seamen erupted in violent confrontations in many port cities, with some deaths. Multiracial communities in Cardiff, South Shields, Liverpool and Glasgow defended themselves from attack. After these race riots there were attempts to deport black seamen and a 1925 Act imposed an effective colour bar on migrant seamen.
In the period between the wars organisations such as the League of Coloured Peoples supported members of black communities while political organisations such as the Pan African Congress and the West African Students’ Union campaigned for the end of colonial rule (see: ‘Transcontinental activism’). Meanwhile anti-Semitism was on the rise across Europe. An attempt in 1936 by British fascists to march through London’s working-class Jewish East End was prevented by community action in what is known as the Battle of Cable Street. After Kristallnacht in 1938 some 10,000 Jewish refugee children from Germany and occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia came to Britain in the charity-run Kindertransport programme (see: ‘Jewish refuge’).
The Second World War and its aftermath. Internment of ‘enemy aliens’ was low key at first, but intensified in 1940 following attacks on German and Italian properties. Some German Jewish refugees found themselves imprisoned alongside Nazi sympathisers and, after a ship carrying internees to Canada was torpedoed by a German submarine the internment programme was quietly abandoned.
As in the previous war, Asian seamen formed a large part of the merchant convoys bringing essential food across the Atlantic to the UK, but were paid far less than white crew members. At the start of the war Bengali seamen went on strike across the British Empire to demand better wages and working conditions. While some strikes were unsuccessful, others managed to secure concessions and a pay rise from their shipping companies.
Two major waves of immigration came as a result of the war. After initially refusing, the government passed the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act[VB9] , which allowed Polish servicemen who had served in the armed forces against Germany to be joined in Britain by their families (see: ‘Polish soldiers and refugees’). The acute shortage of labour – especially in the transport and health services – led the government to invite people from the ‘New Commonwealth’ (the Caribbean, Africa and India) to come and fill the gaps. The 1948 Nationality Act allowed full right of entry and citizenship to all Commonwealth citizens. Some of the first arrivals from the Caribbean – on ships such as the Almanzora and Empire Windrush (which also carried Polish women and children) – were first housed in underground air raid shelters while they signed on for work.
As always, immigrants’ experiences varied but racism was commonly encountered by African and Caribbean settlers who were often refused employment and housing, something also experienced by many Irish people. There was racist violence, too, culminating in the 1959 murder in Notting Hill of Antiguan Kelso Cochrane (see: ‘Murder in Notting Hill’). In response to racial discrimination and attack, people organised. Examples of this included the Notting Hill Carnival and the successful 1960 Bristol bus boycott that forced the local bus company to employ black drivers.
At the same time as the government was encouraging immigration it was also encouraging emigration of British workers, especially to Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Irish migration in the modern period. Emigration from Ireland to Britain continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It increased massively in the 1950s as economic decline pushed young men and women towards the growing job opportunities in the UK, especially in the building industry which was thriving in the postwar construction boom, and shortage of labour. (see: Music and migration: songs from the Irish in Birmingham).
Between 1951 and 1971 the number of Irish in Britain rose to a million, representing nearly 2% of the UK’s population and equal to about 12% of Ireland’s. Echoing the nineteenth century Irish navvies who had built canals and railways, many of the new immigrants worked on construction of the new motorways and building sites all over the country while Irish nurses joined women from the Caribbean as essential workers in the young NHS.
Although anti-Irish racism remained and was sometimes virulent (with Irish communities especially targeted during the spate of IRA terrorist acts on English soil in the 1970s and 1980s), by the turn of the twenty-first century Britain’s Irish were rarely if ever spoken of as a problematic minority group, as they had been in previous eras. Stereotypical ‘Irish jokes’ that had once been widespread were fading in popularity, possibly helped by the ‘Celtic tiger’ economic boom that led to migration to Ireland in the 1990s. Following the economic crash in the 2000s emigration from Ireland to other EU countries, especially the UK, began to grow again, this time often to jobs in the business, technology and commercial sectors.
1960s–present
The latter half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century saw migration patterns shift as Britain’s relationship with its closest neighbours changed and new wars caused new crises.
Cold War refugees. Between the 1950s and the 1980s conflicts in many parts of the world fuelled by the antagonism between the USA and the Soviet Union resulted in flows of refugees. Those from Hungary and Vietnam were victims of Soviet-backed aggression while those from South Africa, Chile and other Latin American countries were fleeing violent regimes supported by the West. Bound by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the UK accepted refugees while placing increasing restrictions on them.
Racism and antiracism in the later twentieth century. During the 1950s and early 1960s increasing numbers of men from India and Pakistan came to work, primarily in the textile mills of northern England. Many left their families back home, but when it became clear that the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act would make it much harder for them to return to the UK once they had travelled, wives and children came to join them. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he warned that non-white immigration would lead to violent civil conflict, raised the temperature of racial tension at a time when Asian refugees expelled from Kenya were arriving. In spite of a new Act which would prevent their settlement, as well as marches supporting Powell, public outcry forced the government to allow entry to Kenyan Asians, and those from Uganda four years later. During the 1970s rising unemployment and a deepening economic crisis fuelled the rise of the overtly racist National Front. In response, Rock Against Racism brought together white and black music fans of punk, ska and reggae while the Anti Nazi League confronted racists on the streets.
Following the racist murder of a young Sikh in Southall in 1976 the Asian Youth Movement was formed, one of many antiracist organisations set up by the young second generation whose parents had migrated from the New Commonwealth (see: ‘Resisting Racism’). During the acute economic crisis of the 1980s resentments as a result of racist attacks and tensions between black youth and police use of the ‘sus’ (suspected person) law led to rioting in St Pauls (Bristol), Toxteth (Liverpool), Brixton (London) and other cities. The official Scarman inquiry into the events in Brixton blamed the disproportionate effect of urban deprivation and the heavy-handed policing of black youth.
Between the 1980s and the early 2000s a series of racist murders and deaths in police custody led to campaigns for justice by friends and families. In one case, the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, an eventual inquiry blamed the ‘institutional racism’ of the police for the lack of arrests.
Free movement of labour in the European Union. Following the 1993 Maastricht Treaty a condition of membership of the European Union’s single market was the principle of ‘free movement of labour’: that all member states must allow free entry to people from other member states seeking work. In the following decade, a time of economic boom and the growth of service industries needing cheap labour, mass migration to the UK reached and remained at an all-time high. For the first time, more people were coming to Britain than were leaving. After the 2008 banking crisis and the government’s austerity policy from 2010 onwards, anti-immigration feeling grew and became a regular feature of the mainstream press. Antagonism to Eastern European migrants based on a belief that they threatened jobs and overstretched public services became mixed with growing Islamophobia, fuelled partly by terrorist incidents in the UK and the wider world. In this anti-immigration climate, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), with its emphasis on limiting immigration, scored major successes in elections to the European Parliament and gained four million votes in the 2015 General Election. By the time of the 2016 referendum on membership of the EU, immigration was a hot political issue and the desire to control it, a desire encouraged by politicians, appeared to be a major factor behind the majority vote to leave.
Flight from conflict zones. From the 1980s onwards, civil wars in collapsed states and bloody conflicts intensified by foreign intervention caused a drastic increase in refugee numbers. People seeking asylum or a better life risked their lives at the hands of people traffickers, many perishing as flimsy boats sank in the Mediterranean or ending up in the Calais migrant camp at Sangatte or the later ‘Jungle’. UK laws placed increased restrictions on the rights and access to services of asylum seekers, many of whom were held in detention centres. The numbers allowed to settle by the UK were tiny compared to those housed by many poorer countries (see: ‘Go Home’).
A migrant crisis or an identity crisis?
As in earlier centuries, migration to Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries saw transformation in areas from business, fashion and food to music, the media, sport, the visual arts, literature, and beyond. While parts of the country seem relaxed and comfortable with these changes, other parts and people remain uneasy about what migration and the changes it has brought mean for British identity.
Written by Martin Spafford, Schools History Project