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History Notes Immigration in post-war Britain Notes

Sivanandan Race Class And The State Notes

Updated Sivanandan Race Class And The State Notes

Immigration in post-war Britain Notes

Immigration in post-war Britain

Approximately 20 pages

Notes on secondary literature....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Immigration in post-war Britain Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Sivanandan – ‘Race, class and the state: the political economy of immigration’, 1976, in Catching History on the Wing

  • Unlike most European countries in the postwar period, Britain had a comparatively uncompetitive source of labour to run to, in its colonies and ex-colonies

    • ‘Colonialism had already under-developed these countries and thrown up a reserve army of labour which now waited in readiness’

    • colonialism leaves countries at independence with a large labour force and no capital to make that labour productive

  • The free market decided the numbers of immigrants, but ‘economic growth and the colonial legacy determined the nature of the work they were put to’

    • Indigenous workers moved upwards to better paid jobs, training programmes etc, leaving the dirty, hard, low-paid work to immigrant labour

    • The labour shortage was general, but whilst the more attractive/dynamic sectors could draw the best qualified labour from indigenous or immigrants, the non-growth sector had only new entrants

      • Hence unskilled, low status jobs for ‘coloured immigrants’ – textiles, engineering and foundry works, transport and communication, or as waiters, porters, kitchen hands

  • ‘Since the opportunities for such work obtained chiefly in the already overcrowded conurbations, immigrants came to occupy some of the worst housing in the country’

    • this exacerbated by extortionate rents charged by slum landlords

      • difficulty of obtaining loans and prejudice of sellers made it difficult to buy houses

    • they were later accused of overcrowding property

    • immigrants became ‘ghetto-ised and locked into the decaying areas of the inner city’

  • The immigrant had cost Britain nothing in terms of education, healthcare etc, and hence represented a saving over native labour

    • This saving was further increased as immigrants left their families behind – less need for schools, housing, hospitals, transport etc

  • The shortage of workers made immigrants economically acceptable, the shortage of housing made them socially undesirable

    • By the late 1950s this contradiction became more defined in terms of the ‘immigrant problem’

    • ‘Having already deprived one section of the working class (the indigenous) of its basic needs, it [capital] now deprives it further in order to exploit another section (the blacks) even more – but, at the same time, prevents them both from coming to a common consciousness of class by intruding that other consciousness of race’

      • immigration highlighted and reinforced existing social deprivation, but racism defined immigration as its cause

      • ‘the economic profit from immigration had gone to capital,...

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