Welcome strangers

5 April 2012

Poor British. They can't do anything by themselves. Fortunately, as Robert Winder reminds us, immigrants have been obliging enough to keep bringing us the gifts of civilisation, helping an otherwise backward island to keep up with its Continental neighbours.

So much so that we are, and always have been, a "nation of immigrants", permanently diverse, continually rejuvenated by "dynamic injections of new blood".

In Bloody Foreigners, Winder puts in a lot and leaves out a lot. Its 25 chapters cover a vast scope, from the "first immigrants" of 25,000 years ago to the latest indignation about the treatment of refugees.

In a very attractive way, it brings immigration and immigrants to life with an abundance of stories of the personal experiences, good and bad, of immigrants in Britain, with some remarkable and moving examples going back to the Middle Ages.

An exhaustive catalogue of past episodes of immigration is saved from being exhausting by enthusiastic zeal.

The message, that we owe (even) more to immigrants than we think, echoes the liberal Establishment's received wisdom, repeated continually in its media and by the Government and by its handmaiden, the Institute of Public Policy Research.

However, Winder certainly shows the debt owed to enterprising immigrants: to medieval Flemings in creating a textile industry, to the Dutch for draining the Fens, to the Huguenots for practically everything.

There is a welcome reminder of the massive contribution of Commonwealth forces to the effort in both world wars. Most of this is not new, but Winder's homework shows in his impressively long list of (mostly secondary) sources.

A pity, therefore, that this commitment to an interesting and positive story about immigration is soured by a persistently negative story about those who disagree. Anxieties and criticisms, past and present, are dismissed sniffily.

Sixteenth-century surveys of aliens have to be "nervous"; comments on asylum seekers are written in "venom"; 19th century immigrant crime is described in a "breathless scandalised manner still familiar today". And so on.

A more homogeneous past, from Anglo-Saxons onwards, is deconstructed as mere myth. Some historical oddities are distracting. For example, St George was not a Turkish Knight - in his day, the nightmare of the Turkish destruction of his eastern Roman civilisation was a millennium away.

The "Door Closes", "Little England" and "Fortress Britain" are clichés too familiar and, more important, inaccurate.

The fundamental problem is that a semi-technical subject is presented here with strong economic and demographic assertions unsupported by any systematic comparative statistics beyond numbers scattered in the text and devoid of reference to primary sources or analysis.

Maybe tables and graphs are unfitting for a literary work, but in that case the literary approach is unfitted to this subject.

We do know something about the historical demography of England. A few major episodes apart, for many centuries the demographic contribution of immigrants to its population has been minor, quite unlike today.

Emerging genetic evidence suggests a long-term continuity. If there ever was a strong African presence in 18th century London, it has not endured to the present.

The Door did not close in 1962; substantial immigration from New Commonwealth countries and elsewhere continued, accelerating since the late 1970s.

Most immigrants in Britain today, including whole new communities, entered after the legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, which restored equality of treatment with other foreigners.

Most of these immigrants have not been workers; until very recently inflow was dominated by dependants, and numbers of new spouses have increased substantially.

Far from Fortress Britain, the UK has gained almost 2.3 million new foreign citizens since 1984. Britain was not suffering a deficit of people in the 1960s; on the contrary, the rate of population growth provoked a parliamentary committee in 1971 to urge action to limit it.

Now the same problem has returned. Official projections, using immigration forecasts well below recent official data on inflow, promise

5.6 million more people by 2031, 85 per cent from immigration. Continuation of actual recent levels would add more than seven million; the equivalent of another London. Celebrations of immigration and diversity do not dwell on the benefits of such radical tranformations.

A positive picture of immigration by the metropolitan liberal bourgeoisie is understandable; they enjoy cheap services and the pleasure of occupying the moral high ground.

The effects on more ordinary folk are less benign; they have less choice of places to live, or of schools for their children. Is Britain really "eagerly accepting" 150,000 immigrants a year (actually 245,000, while 91,000 citizens depart)? Opinion polls, and panicky government responses, suggest otherwise.

Those unfamiliar with the story of migration will find it told attractively in these pages, though perhaps with words too comfortable to be convincing. For a critical analysis, go elsewhere, if you can find a suitable book. Mainline publishers tend not to like that kind of thing. Safety first, after all.

David Coleman is Professor of Demography at Oxford University.

Welcome strangers

Read More