Immigration

Writer: David Rosenberg

The Aliens Act | An immigrant land | The 'aliens' have landed | Media frenzy | Winners and losers | Who's British now? | Timeline

Media frenzy

'Refugees get jobs; Britons get dole' is typical of newspaper headlines today. Their targets are often those fleeing war and catastrophe. This particular headline, though, actually appeared in June 1938 in the Sunday Pictorial. It was railing against Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. At that time the Sunday Express, too, claimed: 'there is a big influx of foreign Jews… they are overrunning the country'.

The comment of press and politicians alike on immigration has often been lurid. 'Anyone who wants to realise what the peril really is has only to walk… in the East End of London. They will find these places literally infested with aliens', said the politician Sir Ernest Wild in 1919.

Scaremongering

The popular press still plays a powerful role in scaremongering. They label people who have taken the desperate step of uprooting themselves from their homes and communities to live in Britain, as 'scroungers', 'liars', 'cheats' and 'fraudsters', threatening to 'flood' or 'stampede' a 'small overcrowded island'.

Politicians who make anti-immigrant statements are guaranteed wide media coverage. The term 'swamping' entered the modern immigration debate in a BBC Panorama interview in 1978 when Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher said that British people 'feared that they might be swamped by people of a different culture.' These scare tactics had their roots much earlier though. In 1902 the Bishop of Stepney said Jews were 'swamping whole areas once populated by English people.

The media and politicians continually stirred up agitation against Jewish immigrants in the 1890s. They claimed that Jews were living in overcrowded unsanitary conditions, spreading disease, undermining sexual mores, undercutting British workers' wages and spreading political subversion.

An editorial in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1905 proposed 'that the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land.' Claims that immigrants bring disease have been echoed ever since. Michael Howard recenty called for prospective immigrants to be subject to compulsory checks to ensure 'they are not a public health risk'.

Union members fearing competition from an influx of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers, passed resolutions in 1892, '94 and '95 demanding legislation to stem the flow of 'alien paupers'. The dockers' leader Ben Tillett said of the Jewish immigrants: 'You are our brothers and we will do our duty by you but we wish you had not come'.

The British Brothers

In 1901 a popular anti-alien movement was formed called The British Brothers League. It had the support of local politicians, clergy and newspaper owners. It organised marches, petitions and rallies where its speakers proclaimed, 'We will not have this country made the dumping ground for the scum of Europe. This is England not the dustbin of Russia and Austria.'

The tactic of organising provocative marches and rallies to terrorise immigrant areas was repeated by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s ,the National Front in the 1970s, and more recently the British National Party.

Daily life for immigrants at the turn of the 20th century was the very opposite of how they were portrayed. Rather than taking other people's housing they lived in terribly cramped conditions; far from being scroungers they often worked 12-16 hour days. They did not take 'English workers' jobs but were mostly employed by Jewish sweatshop owners. Instead of lowering the morals of society they were dedicated to education and self-improvement. And while maintaining their own language and culture, they made strenuous efforts to ensure that they and their children spoke English.

The sensationalism of the press and certain politicians has helped mould a section of public opinion. It also legitimised the activities of racist political movements who marched to demand an end to immigration and a start to repatriation. In the 1960s Enoch Powell's calls to halt immigration were taken up by meat porters and dockers. They marched in their thousands to Trafalgar Square in support if his ideas. Today, far right political parties try to build on the anti-immigrant sentiments printed daily in the press.

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