Robert Miles And Paula Cleary – Britain Notes

Robert Miles and Paula Cleary – Britain: Post-Colonial Migration in Context

(in Dietrich Thränhardt (ed.), Europe: A New Immigration Continent)

• (p. 157) the British Nationality Act of 1948 divided British subjects into two categories

  • those defined juridically as citizen of the UK and Colonies

  • citizens of ex-colonies which had gained independence but opted to remain part of the Commonwealth

    • both categories possessed identical rights and obligations, including the right to enter and settle in Britain

• Exploration and statistics on pre-commonwealth European migration to Britain, 1945-50

• The British govt became concerned about Commonwealth migration because (p. 160)

1. As British subjects, the entry and occupation position of Caribbean migrants couldn’t be controlled by the state; they could not be directed to those sectors which British labour avoided

2. These subjects were ‘coloured’ and therefore constituted a potential social problem, a threat to the supposed heterogeneity of Britain

• Migration from the Caribbean was prompted not just by demand for labour

  • Also the ‘history of exploitation and dependence upon a narrow range of products for sale on the world market meant that a significant proportion of the population of these islands had come to depend economically upon being migrant labourers’ (p. 161)

• ‘Migration from the British Caribbean was composed almost equally of men and women, although they entered and reinforced a sexually segregated labour market’

  • most wanted to earn enough to return home richer

• In contrast to Caribbean migration, ‘that from the Indian sub-continent was composed initially largely of single men’

• Public hostility to New Commonwealth immigrants was increasingly open in the late 1950s, despite the fact that they were filling jobs the indigenous population didn’t want to do (p. 163)

  • This was grounded in racism and fear of economic insecurity, but was also ‘encouraged and legitimated by governments’

    • E.g. Conservative govt of early 1950s tried to use administrative devices to reduce colonial migration

    • Commonwealth Relations Office tried to persuade Jamaica (and did persuade Pakistan) to oblige migrants to put a deposit down on their return flight

  • The ‘beat-the-ban’ migration c. 1960 represented a large influx of unskilled...

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