The UK’s troubled history with immigration and refugees

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, over 2 million Ukrainians have been displaced and scattered, causing one of the most devastating refugee crises of the 21st century. Whitehall was quick to condemn the invasion but remained plagued by the bureaucratic sludge in its cogs. It took enormous pressure and public outcry to nudge the British government into action, but even then after so much dithering about, merely 1% of the 5,535 people who had applied for refuge were granted visas. The home office’s sluggish and lackadaisical attitudes in the face of such a dire and urgent crisis would not be a surprise to many familiar with the incumbent Tory government. Patel’s policy on immigration is arguably one of the harshest of the last 20 years. It begs to ask: Are British attitudes toward immigration changing? Is the UK becoming more “closed”? Most of Britain’s immigration history in the 20th was drastically different to how it is like today. By the end of the second world war, there were huge gaps in the UK labour market. The newly created NHS and London transport fuelled the labour shortage, along with post-war rebuilding. As a result, 800 million British subject from the colony were eligible to live and work in the UK, which saw a large influx of immigrants, particularly those from colonies in Africa and the Caribbean – the so-called “Windrush Generation”. This meant that men and women from the Bahamas to Barbados, or anywhere else from the empire were able to settle here sans immigration control. Over the next few decades, immigration began to grow rapidly, mostly due to conflicts in the Commonwealth, like Africanisation in Kenya and Idi Amin’s Uganda.

Many in Britain began to grow uncomfortable with the prospects of mass non-white immigration. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 (and later the Immigration Act 1971) was passed to restrict immigration and drastically reduced migration from the commonwealth (particularly aimed at coloured migrants of Afro-Caribbean descent). On one April day in 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell spoke to a crowd in Birmingham, now titled the “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he strongly opposed mass immigration, filled with racist implications. This landmark speech solidified the anti-immigration position held by many in Britain, and since then, has allowed for the framework for the current immigration policy. Today, around half of Britons believe that migrant numbers over the last 10 years have been too high, and only about 25% believe immigration levels over the past decade have been “about right”. However, despite these restrictions, UK immigration levels today are at their highest level. To explain this, we see that we do not discuss the breakdown of what kind of immigration we are referring to. The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies’ 2019 report and “Skills premium” and “ethnic premium” studies how different European countries’ attitudes towards immigration depend on the “skill” vs the “European-ness” of the immigrant.

The results show that the UK has the highest “Skill premium” in the study, suggesting that the UK has the greatest bias toward higher-skilled immigration, compared to European immigration. It (surprisingly) shows Britain’s preference of meritocracy over race, something that she has championed for years. This is in contrast to Britain’s colonial history, where racial prejudice and preferential policies once haunted the empire. While this move towards a qualification-based immigration system is a welcome one, the Ukraine crisis shows that institutions for refugees are still insufficient. Humanity must always come first, and during times like these, we ought to offer the best support we can.

Written by Alex Ho