Immigration

Writer: David Rosenberg

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The 'aliens' have landed

Today the media defend themselves against accusations of racism in their coverage of immigration by drawing distinctions between 'genuine refugees', 'bogus asylum-seekers' and 'economic migrants'.

Refugees who are unable to provide sufficient documentation are regarded as 'bogus', despite the horrendous circumstances from which they may have fled. 'Genuine' refugees, are seen as worthy of support, while 'economic migrants' are condemned as people taking advantage. Most immigrant groups have comprised all of these. It is hard to separate them.

Pogroms

The 19th century Czarist Russian Empire included the largest Jewish community in the world. They were restricted to a few ways of earning their living and confined to an area called the 'Pale of Settlement'. Many were poor and starving. When Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by a group of radicals which included Jews there was a wave of pogroms – government encouraged mob attacks on Jewish villages and settlements - which left many Jews dead and wounded.

Jews faced an uncertain future. Some stayed to fight for political change but half of them (2.5 million) emigrated – mainly to the USA. Around 150,000, mostly poor, semi-skilled and unskilled workers, arrived in Britain.

From Ireland to Ukraine

Thousands of Irish immigrants arrived in the wake of the great hunger of 1845-49 during which 1.5 million people died of starvation and disease. They came to England to work on the railways, in the mills and the docks. They certainly met hostility and stereotyping but it paled by comparison to the furore that erupted against mass Jewish immigration.

Similarly, after the second world war Britain provided a home to half a million immigrants from Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. They were recruited to factories rebuilding British industry after the war. Another wave of immigration brought many semi-skilled and unskilled Irish labourers. But these large white immigrations went almost unremarked upon, compared with the reaction towards Black immigrants from the Commonwealth and Dependent territories who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s.

Recruiting from the colonies

Britain's labour shortages continued into the 1950s and the government and employers wanted a ready source of cheap labour. They looked towards the colonies. Under the British Nationality Act of 1948, everyone born within Britain's colonies was considered a UK citizen. These citizens looked on Britain as the 'mother country'. When London Transport, the National Health Service and the British Hotel and Restaurant Associations actively invited people from the colonies to settle for work in Britain, many jumped at the opportunity to better themselves and provide new opportunities for their children. They had no idea that within a few years they would be facing a racist backlash.

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