Zig Layton Henry The Politics Of Immigration Notes

Zig Layton-Henry – The Politics of Immigration

Chapter One

• The background to colonial immigration (p. 8)

  • Unlike other immigrant groups, Commonwealth immigrants had rights of access, citizenship

• WW2 was a huge catalyst for immigration

  • War effort was generally conducive to solidarity across racial lines

  • Restrictions on black migration to Britain were removed

  • Colonial migrants had little difficulty finding employment because of the labour shortages of the war period

    • Many were repatriated afterwards, but some had married and stayed

• In 1948 because of labour shortages UK govt set up a working party on the employment of colonial surplus labour (p. 12)

  • Committee was concerned about discrimination against coloured immigrants and the difficulties of assimilating them

  • Recommended no organized large-scale immigration of male workers

  • Thought recruitment of women workers was important because of shortage of nurses and domestic workers in newly established NHS

• Nevertheless, migration began with shipments of colonial workers

  • This was largely spontaneous and voluntary: there was no recruitment and organization as in e.g. Germany

  • Estimates of net immigration figures by new commonwealth country (p. 13)

  • Immigration quickly became a chain phenomenon

  • Some organizations did recruit workers

    • E.g. London Transport, also ‘Woolf’s rubber factory in Southall enlisted workers from the Punjab, and northern textile companies advertised for workers in the Indian and Pakistani press’

• ‘New Commonwealth immigration occurred because post-war reconstruction and the expansion of the British economy in the 1950s and 1960s created shortages of labour which could not be filled by British, Irish or other European sources’

  • ‘The less profitable, often labour-intensive, sectors of the economy such as public transport, the Health Service, the textile industry and metal manufacture could not compete successfully for the labour of British workers with the more profitable sectors such as the car industry, telecommunications and insurance’

  • employers only too pleased to recruit new commonwealth workers (cheap?)

• (p. 17) British migration patterns are in fact characteristic of other Western European countries following WW2

  • initially European immigration to fuel reconstruction, later colonial migration

  • brief discussion of the benefits of migration to European countries (p. 18)

  • brief discussion of challenges of assimilation, xenophobia

Chapter Two – The response to post-war immigration

• You might expect the British govt to have gratefully received black help during WW2

  • Actually no, the establishment was extremely ambivalent about it

• (p. 29) the working party on recruiting colonial surplus labour was reconvened in 1950

  • it recommended that

    • Britain press colonial govts to reduce immigration by spreading information that jobs were scarce, issuing passports selectively

    • Britain impose greater controls at ports

    • Set up a working party to disperse, find employment for or repatriate those already here

• The government decided not to act, and a steady flow of contradictory reports on the actually very small number of black immigrants continued (p. 30)

  • The govt may have been slightly hostile because of the experience of the post WW1 boom as short-lived

  • But obviously racial prejudice was a powerful factor

    • Black immigrants contributed in all the same important ways as white immigrants (i.e. economically), but were perceived (primarily by govt) as alien, and likely to cause law and order problems

• (p. 32) in 1953 the Ministry of Labour reported that black unemployment was higher than white, on account of

  • lack of relevant skills

  • discrimination by employers

    • it also reported that employers complained of

      • the high turnover of black workers

      • their quarrelsomeness and lack of discipline

      • objections raised by white workers

  • black women were stereotypes as stupid, but reliable domestics and nurses

  • the working party concluded that coloured immigrants were law abiding and willing to work, but were more likely to be...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Immigration in post-war Britain Notes.