History Notes Immigration in post-war Britain Notes
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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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