Labour Migration: a historical perspective

For many centuries, states have tried to limit the movement of their people. Before the twentieth century, the main form that regulation took lay in attempts to stop the movement between the countryside and the towns. As far back as the sixteenth century, laws were in place to prevent artisans moving from the land to the towns in search of higher wages. Before 1900, however, there was very little sense that the state should act to prevent people moving across borders. Many professions were mobile, including sailors, dockers, tailors and weavers. In large towns and cities, there were often centres inhabited by people from many different backgrounds. There ways in which the state discriminated against minorities, most notably on grounds of religion, but there was no idea that people were born into any one particular nationality, and neither that the state existed to prevent people from one country moving and settling on the land of another.

Before 1900, there were no immigration controls in Britain. When attempts were made to prevent people born outside Britain from settling, these plans were rejected. Between 1800 and 1900, a number of migrants were able to settle in Britain. They included bomb-plotters, anarchists, and revolutionaries of many different stripes, from Karl Marx to Prince Kropotkin. Not one of these foreigners was deported. Tens of thousands of Jews arrived, many of them poor, fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Not one was subject to anything like our modern system of labour control.

The constitutional theorist Erskine May justified Britain's liberal policy at the time, 'It has been a proud tradition for England to afford an inviolable asylum to men of every rank and condition, seeking refuge on her shores, from persecution and danger in their own lands.'[i] A laissez-faire attitude towards migration was seen as the best counterpart to the national policy of free trade. Britain was the world's greatest merchant power. A world without tariffs was one that her goods would dominate. What was true for economics was true also for politics. Free movement was seen to create prosperity. Foreigners were treated as free to enter the country, to work and to stay.

          When anti-immigrant legislation was suggested, it was defeated. In 1855, an alliance of former supporters of the People's Charter helped to block a proposed anti-asylum Bill aimed at excluding foreign dissidents, including the prominent Hungarian nationalist Louis Kossuth. The former Chartist George Julian Harney warned in the press that any such plans would be met with massive pro-refugee demonstrations in the great cities.[ii]

          The first immigration controls were the Aliens Restriction Act of 1905. Immigration officers acquired the power to question migrants at ports. The Act banned entry to ships carrying illegal immigrants. It stated that aliens convicted of offences would be liable to deportation, as would any foreigners entering the country without means of support. A still harsher Aliens Restriction Act was passed following the outbreak of war in 1914. These restrictions were contentious at the time, and unpopular in many quarters.

          The police did attempt to make use of their powers under the Act. In 1919, for example, there were sustained race riots on South Shields. They began with attempts by white sailors to prevent ships from taking on Arab crews. At this time, there were about 600 Yemeni seamen living in the town. Groups of white sailors besieged them in their homes. The police and then the Army were called in, not to halt the pogroms, but to complete them. Twelve Yemenis were deported in 1919.[iii] Another 100 were deported in 1922, subject to Aliens Immigration orders. Another 300 left voluntarily. Yet by 1930, the black community had re-established itself, and was actually larger than it had been 10 years earlier, 800 rather than 600 people.[iv] The Aliens Restriction Act was not just discriminatory; it was also unworkable.

Labour Migration: the post-war experience

The contemporary discussion of labour migration is dominated by events since 1945, especially the immigration of black workers from the British Commonwealth in the conditions of post-war boom. The migrants that travelled to Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s gained from a tight labour market. Britain needed workers from abroad. Such discussion as there was in Parliament focussed on the possible relaxation of anti-alien laws. One Conservative spokesman Peter Thorneycroft complained in the Commons of the Labour government's failure to encourage migrants to arrive in larger numbers, 'The fact is that with a shortage of manpower in this country every kind of administrative and bureaucratic difficulty is put in the way of the volunteer who tries to get into this country to work.' Jim Callaghan replied for Labour, and in similar terms. 'In a few years, we will be faced with a shortage of labour, not with a shortage of jobs. We ought now to become a country where immigrants are welcomed ... who is going to pay for the old-age pensions and social services unless we have an addition to the population, which only immigration can provide in the years to come?'[v]

The first beneficiaries of the atmosphere of welcome were a number of European Volunteer Workers (EVWs). The label was applied retrospectively to 120,000 Polish soldiers who had fought with Britain against Germany, and to 90,000 further volunteers from the Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Yugoslavia.[vi] The historian J. A. Tannahill wrote in 1958 that 'after nearly ten years, the bulk of EVWs are still employed in jobs, where demand for labour far exceeds supply.' The main areas of employment were mining, bricklaying, textiles and hospitals. To quote Tannahill again, 'This work has contributed much more to the country's economic prosperity than the numbers would suggest.'[vii] In some places, the EVWs were subject to local terms of employment that bound them to working for a single employer for many years. No laws were introduced to facilitate such schemes of bonded labour. When civil servants discussed which department should monitor the success of this labour migration scheme, they had some difficulty knowing even which government department was responsible for these workers. Effectively, they were allowed to join the labour market on equal terms to any other person.

The European Volunteer Workers were accompanied by a second wave of arrivals, some 100,000 Irish who came to England between 1945 and 1951. They were then followed by a third group of migrants from the Commonwealth. The presence of this new generation was symbolised by the arrival in London of the Empire Windrush in 1948.[viii] Both groups were then left free to find work where they could: true, there was little government support, but more positively, neither was there any compulsion.

Through the 1940s, both the Labour government and the opposition accepted the need for immigration. After 1951, the incoming Conservative government was helped by the fact that all citizens of British dominions had British citizenship. One Conservative minister explained the willingness to accept Commonwealth migrants, 'It was not due to a deliberate act of policy formally announced and embodied in our law. It is not even a policy which gradually grew up and became established by custom ... It is simply a fact which we have taken for granted from the earliest days in which our forebears ventured forth across the seas.'[ix] The citizenship rights of British subjects had never previously been subject to any process of debate. Before 1945, few people from India or the West Indies had the funds for travel. The idea that all British subjects should receive equal treatment was the logical corollary of the civilising mission claimed for British imperial rule. The principle was also enshrined in the 1948 Nationality Act.

Business also extended its own welcome to the new arrivals. One typical piece appeared in the Voice of North East Industry. 'If the North East's plans for continued economic growth are [to be] realised, wrote, J. E. T. Aldridge, 'then it can be expected that greater numbers of immigrants will make their way here.' Migrants should be welcomed. 'Any conception of other racial groups being inherently inferior in intelligence to our own is unfounded ... Coloured workers are quite as trainable as other workers ... As with white workers, aptitudes and application to the work situation will vary with the individual.' The language may appear patronising to present-day audiences, but we should recognise the intention as positive.[x]

The advantages of welcoming the new arrivals were clear. Many migrants had been educated in British-style schools. The majority spoke English and exhibited a positive even in some cases idealised conception of British democracy. The migrants identified strongly with Britain and her civilising mission in the world. One anecdote will suffice. Pindi Naroo grew up in Kenya in the 1940s. His older brother won a scholarship to study in England and completed his medical decree at Durham. On his brother's return to Kenya, 'The entire school came out with a Union Jack to welcome him. You see it was an honour to go to Britain for higher education.'[xi]

At least until the end of the 1950s, British immigration practice remained liberal. This was the period when black and Asian settlers first began to arrive and live in London, the West Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West. A discreet contract was at work, its terms unspoken but known. People from the West Indies, Pakistan and India were allowed into Britain. In return they were asked to do the unskilled jobs that most white workers rejected. As long as the economy continued to grow, the state and most British people continued to respect the right of new arrivals to settle.

The terms of this 'arrangement' were of course always unfair, and flawed even on their own terms. For the migrants who came were the best of their home country's youth. Fired with ambition, it seemed extraordinary to them, that they were now expected to work in menial trades. Om Middha came to Britain, aged 24, and a former colonial policeman, having already been awarded the highest medal for gallantry open to members of his career:

In England, my first job was in a glass factory. That was in 1954. At that time, I was asked to do nothing more exhilarating than carrying boxes of tools. In India I was used to servants making tea, in England it became my job. It was a strange induction but eventually I left and found a job working in a railway office. The change of life-style was educational, but I was not deterred for I saw this merely as a setback. To qualify as a barrister I had to have an A level in Latin. In my spare time I studied this and also French at night school.[xii]

Stop-go intervention

The first turning point came in 1962, with the passing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. All Commonwealth citizens became subject to immigration control for the first time, except persons born in the United Kingdom, holders of passports issued by the UK government and their descendants.[xiii] According to A. Sivanandan of the Institute of Race Relations, 'Racialism was no longer a matter of free enterprise; it was nationalised. If labour from the "coloured" Commonwealth and colonies was still needed, its intake and its deployment was going to be regulated not by the market forces of discrimination but by the regulatory instruments of the state itself.'[xiv]

Why then did the law change? The Conservative argument, put at the time, was that the people of Britain had woken up to the threat of mass migration. Rather than endure decades of further black migration, they chose to insist on a halt. In the words of Tory MP Cyril Osborne, 'If unlimited immigration were allowed, we should ultimately become a chocolate-coloured Afro-Asian mixed society. That I do not want.'[xv] Yet such an 'explanation' can hardly do justice to the complete summersault that took place in British migration policy. Before 1962, politicians and business leaders were by and large united in the defence of the idea of bringing migrants to Britain. Even individuals who would later be associated with the arguments for controls, were at this stage welcoming. The Minister for Health, one Enoch Powell, campaigned to bring nurses from India and the West Indies to Britain.[xvi] After 1962, Britain entered into a new period of control. Between 1950 and 1962 there was no great evidence that popular attitudes of hostility were indeed stronger than attitudes of welcome. Public opinion did shift, but later, and in response to a change that was signalled at the top of society.[xvii]

'Throughout the 1950s', writes one commentator Ruth Brown, 'labour shortage was still seen as the main problem for British industries most vulnerable to the "stop-go" cycle, like the car industry ... So in the 1950s the Tory cabinet voted by big majorities against immigration controls.' Yet by the 1960s, almost 'no MP in the Commons would speak out openly in favour of unrestricted immigration and by the mid-to late 1960s levels of immigration form the Commonwealth were down to virtually zero as a result of government legislation.' Brown's explains the shift as a collective political response to the changed economic circumstances of the 1960s. 'Newly arrived black and Asian workers from the Commonwealth proved to be the perfect scapegoats for the troubles which the Tories now faced.'[xviii]

Even after 1962, it was not obvious that British law would remain indefinitely closed. This only became clear following the general election of 1964. After thirteen years in power, the Conservatives were facing defeat. In most areas, they responded pragmatically, with candidates trying to draw attention to local issues, and disassociate themselves from the tired Cabinet.

Peter Griffiths, the Conservative candidate for Smethwick in the West Midlands, accused black workers of bringing leprosy to Britain. His campaign literature included the slogan, 'If you want a Nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.' The leaders of the Conservative Party viewed Griffiths with disdain, but did nothing concrete to discipline him for such aggressive racism. Voters concluded that no one 'really' disagreed with Griffiths. In the 1964 election, Labour gained ground all over Britain. There were only 26 seats were Conservatives took votes from Labour. In 25 of them, the swing to the Tories was less than 3.5 per cent. There was only one constituency where the Conservative vote increased substantially. In Smethwick, Griffiths' vote rose by 7.2 percent.[xix] His campaign became a model for his party.

After 1964, both Labour and Conservatives were converted to a policy of tightened controls. It became one of those policies like crime where increased action was always necessary, irrespective of the real situation on the ground. The 1964 British Nationality Act preserved the right to resume UK citizenship for white settlers in Africa, while excluding black Africans. Labour's 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act extended this distinction to cover the whole Commonwealth. Ancestral connection became the key factor in determining which citizens were subject to immigration control. The rationale was that white immigrants might possess such an ancestral connection, a white British grandparent, while black people would not.[xx]

Among Labour circles, there was still some unease towards immigration controls. Anti-racist laws were needed therefore to restore the balance. Legislation followed including the 1976 Race Relations Act and the 2002 Race Relations Amendment Act. The former outlawed direct discrimination on grounds of race. The latter has extended particular protection to public sector workers. Governments acted to combat racism and institutional racism, discrimination which was most often aimed at workers who were themselves migrants or the children of migrants. But with anti-discrimination laws in place to protect existing black British citizens, controls were again tightened to prevent new migrants from arriving. Roy Hattersley MP spoke in Parliament of the need to accept further immigration controls. He began by explaining that in 1961 he had opposed controls, but by 1965 he had learned to support them. 'I come now to the melancholy view that ... we must impose a test which tries to analyse which immigrants, as well as having jobs, or special skills, are most likely to be assimilated into our national life.'[xxi] Hattersley's speech was adopted in mantra form: no control without assimilation, no assimilation without control.

The 1971 Immigration Act brought direct migration to an end. It distinguished between 'patrials' and 'non-patrials'. Patrials were defined as people who were born in the United Kingdom or who had a parent (or grandparent, in the case of British citizens) who had been born or naturalised in the United Kingdom; or British or Commonwealth citizens who had lived in the United Kingdom for five years and had applied to register as a British citizen. Patrials continued to enjoy free entry. The idea was to facilitate the entry of the Australian- or South African-born children of while English emigrants, while blocking arrivals from the West Indies, India or Pakistan.

The Colour Bar

It has often been assumed that the purpose of immigration controls was primarily to restrict the entry of migrants. If this was the goal, then the controls must be deemed a failure. After each new law, new migrants have arrived. The strong controls may even have increased the numbers arriving. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. 'Most migrants don't wish to die in foreign places even if they manage to acquire that semi in Harrow or a car they could only have dreamed of in Ethiopia or Malawi. I believe that had we not had a series of lock-out immigration policies since 1968, many settled immigrants would have chosen to go back, as long as they had a safety net: the chance to return here for economic reasons ... Hence the paradox: the immigration laws themselves have created a larger immigrant population.'[xxii]

Controls may not have reduced the numbers settling, but if their point was in fact to guide public opinion, to show that something 'tough' was being done, they have been a success. They have sent out a signal that the government had been persuaded of the truth of the anti-immigrant campaign. Whenever race returned to the political agenda, the press called for further restrictions to take the heat out of anti-immigrant prejudice. Wild speculations were made about the numbers of black people entering Britain. Yet despite considerable monitoring of suspected 'aliens', the numbers found were small: just 394 illegal immigrants in 1976, 809 in 1977 and so on.[xxiii]

Each time that black people were attacked, the solution offered was to keep further migrants out. The victims were blamed for racism, as in Margaret Thatcher's 1978 television interview, 'People are really rather afraid', she claimed, 'that this country might be swamped by people of different cultures.'[xxiv] The speech was also a revealing instance of the process whereby hostility began at the state level and then spread down. In its aftermath, the numbers of people telling pollsters that they believed racism was 'an urgent issue facing the community' rose from 9 to 21 percent.[xxv]

          The state has taken on new powers to limit the access of migrants to the labour market. The ultimate weapon has always been the threat of deportation. In December 1977, Northumbria police arrested thirty Bangladeshis following raids on Indian restaurants in Newcastle. The men were accused of having come to Britain illegally, and of working without permits. The police then spoke to the press, boasting of the success of the raids in deterring future migration. Five men were even named in the papers as 'illegal' overstayers.[xxvi] It happened that not one of these supposed 'illegal immigrants' did in fact lack legal papers. The men accused of breaking residence laws were all freed. The last of them Rupa Ali was held without trial in Durham Prison for forty-five days, before being released uncharged.[xxvii] While his arrest had been treated as front-page news, the story that he had in fact been the victim of a terrible injustice went almost unreported.

Redefining persecution

In the past ten years, the most visible group of new migrants have been refugees, travelling to Britain from dictatorships or countries at war. The legal situation facing refugees has been consistently hostile. The numbers rose at a time when the two main forms of post-war migration had been largely closed: labour migration and the migration of dependents. The authorities claimed that refugees were escaping through a legal loophole, refugees responded that they were merely claiming the rights that were theirs. Prior to the 1990s, refugees had indeed enjoyed some protection in law.[xxviii] The right to escape from persecution is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,[xxix] and the right to settle in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. There are reasons why law should offer greater sympathy to 'political' rather than 'economic' migrants. The most important is the memory of the 1930s. At the very moment that Hitler began his persecution of the Jews, the European powers responded with restrictions on refugees. Ministers complained that they did not want to over-burden their country with too many foreigners. The failure of these politicians to react with sympathy was then remembered with shame after 1945, and democrats everywhere promised not to make the same mistakes again.

The 1993 Immigration and Asylum Act brought in new rules for immigration decisions. Refugees' rights to benefit were first restricted in 1996. The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act authorised the removal of refugees and other migrants to third countries and the deportation of overstayers. Section 7 of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act denied any benefits to refugees who did not claim asylum within hours of their arrival: within a year up to 15,000 refugees were living destitute.[xxx]

New laws have made it illegal for refugees to work while their case was being heard, replaced cash benefits with vouchers, and then denied many refugees any access to welfare at all. People fleeing from persecution were not even allowed the dignity of the label 'refugee'. This word was replaced with the more cynical tag, 'asylum seeker', which suggested that until the government had decided whether people were genuine or not, it was to assume that their application was false. Large numbers of refugees were jailed on arrival, in camps such as the Campsfield detention centre near Oxford, or in Her Majesty's Prisons, Haslar, Lindholme and Rochester, at Belmarsh, Bullingdon, Highdown, Holloway, Holme House, Lincoln, Liverpool, Wandsworth and Winchester. Refugees were also held in prison on Teesside.

          Before spring 2000, refugees were free on arrival to settle anywhere in Britain. After April 2000, that choice too was removed. Failure to leave their home on demand, resulted in the refugee concerned being reclassified as intentionally homeless. All benefits were stopped. Britain was much tougher than other countries. In 1997, the UK granted asylum to just 19 percent of people who applied from Afghanistan. In Canada over the same period, 97 percent of Afghanis were accepted. Somali applicants had a 92 percent success rate in Canada, while in the United Kingdom the rate was only 34 percent. Eight-five percent of Colombian asylum applicants received protection in Canada, compared to just 3 percent in Britain.[xxxi]

          The most important barrier blocking the integration of refugees into British life has been the existence of laws preventing asylum seekers from working. Between 1986 and 2002, an asylum applicant could request permission to work if their application for asylum had not been processed. Following the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, this route was closed. The former Home Secretary David Blunkett criticised newspapers such as the Sun for encouraging hostility towards asylum seekers, but the emotive practice of pitting refugees and other welfare recipients in competition with each other was one that began with his own 2002 Act.

Limiting the freedom to work

The law has responded to the ways in which people have settled in Britain. At first, people simply moved and later looked for work. The 1905 Act was designed to close off that route. Later, most migrants were British citizens from the Commonwealth. The 1962, 1964 and 1971 Acts redefined them not as British citizens, but as various other classes of subject, without the same rights to live in Britain and settle. The 1993, 1999, 2002 and 2004 Acts have limited the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Yet employers in Britain have continued to argue that some forms of labour migration should be allowed. Caught between the incompatible pressures to allow and to restrict, the government has introduced an extraordinary range of intermediate schemes, which enable some migrants to work, while restricting the conditions under which they can be employed. Examples of these policies discussed in subsequent chapters include: the working holidaymakers scheme, the restrictions on the employment of citizens from the European Union accession states, work permit schemes such as the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme and the ‘sectors-based schemes’ (SBS) in food processing and hospitality.

          The re-politicisation of race and migration, which has taken place in Britain since 1997, has had a direct effect not just on refugee and asylum policy, but also on the treatment of many other categories of migrants, including workers living in Britain under the work permit schemes. Thus the anti-black and anti-Muslim riots that were witnessed in towns such as Oldham in 2001 have opened up a space for other forms of violent xenophobia, such as the riots against Portuguese workers living in Thetford, who were attacked by a mob of several hundred people following England's defeat at Euro 2004. Similarly, the proliferation of anti-asylum legislation has tended to lead also to a toughening of labour migration policy, including charges for workers applying for immigration employment documents, and the registration scheme for workers from the EU accession states.

          Faced with the extraordinary complexity of different employment schemes, many employers have resorted to illicit practices of recruiting workers who have lacked proper legal standing. The death of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers at Morecombe Bay in February 2004 illustrated the reality of life for many migrant workers. They have been forced to work in a parallel economy, paid often below the minimum wage, working anti-social hours, longer than those that anyone else would tolerate, and often without the normal protection of healthy and safety laws. Those who have protested have often been sacked. Their work was illegal. They have had no rights.

          As greater numbers of labour migrants have been employed in an increasing variety of complex and incompatible schemes, so the numbers of illegal residents and illegal workers have also inevitably risen. Arm in arm with an increasing number of asylum refusals, this process has in turn encouraged the practice of forced deportation of migrants from Britain. As recently as 1975, just 378 people were removed in this way. Since then, the numbers have risen continuously, to 736 in 1977 and 946 in 1981.[xxxii] There were 23,460 deportations in 1990 and they remained at roughly this level until 1996. The figures increased sharply after the 1997 election, rising to 34,775 in 1998, 46,635 in 2000 and an astonishing 65,460 in 2002.[xxxiii]

          In sixty years, migration law has been transformed. Where previously, policy was tolerant, it has become more rigid and authoritarian. There is an urgent need to halt and even reverse this process. Interwar Europe presents with many negative examples of societies, which turned away from liberalism, and having been cut adrift, knew no way to return.