Policy debates about immigration generally focus on two broad themes: the
impact of immigration upon the economy, and its social and cultural impact.
The arguments in favour of immigration are generally couched in economic terms
(though, of course, there are, and always have been, economic arguments against
mass migration). The social impact of immigration , on the other hand, has
usually been seen as negative. Immigrants are seen as taking up valuable resources,
making it more difficult to cohere communities and undermining a sense of
national identity.
As a result, policy makers have seen their role as balancing the economic
need for migrants against the social problems they create. The 'cross-departmental'
government report on The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration
published last month, for instance, expresses broad support for immigration's
positive effect on Britain's economy but fears about its negative impact on
the country's social fabric. Why does immigration inevitably lead to fears
about its social consequences? Largely because the presence of immigrants
helps crystalise already existing social anxieties, particularly anxieties
about national identity and social cohesion. To understand this better I want
to take a brief look at the history of the debate about immigration and race
relations in postwar Britain and to compare the debate about the first set
of mass immigrants in Britain in the 1950s with the debate about the new wave
of immigrants today.
The onset of mass immigration from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean in the
late 1940s and the 1950s coincided with the dismantling of the British Empire,
and the decline of Britain's global status. Immigration became the focus for
the debate about these broader shifts. While policy makers welcomed the influx
of new labour, there was at the same time considerable unease about the impact
that such immigration may have on traditional concepts of Britishness. As
a Colonial Office report of 1955 observed, 'a large coloured community as
a noticeable feature of our social life would weaken... the concept of England
or Britain to which people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are
attached.' These fears translated themselves into a concern about the need
to control immigration. Immigration controls were seen, not as a means of
matching immigrants to jobs, but of preventing the presence of too many non-white
immigrants from tarnishing Britain's racial identity.
The problem for policy makers, however, was that they could not explicitly
say so. To have introduced such discriminatory legislation would have caused
moral outage at home and abroad and undermined Britain's standing in the world.
The experience of Nazism and revulsion against the Holocaust had created hostility
to openly racist legislation. This was particularly so because inhabitants
of Britain's colonies were British subjects and had the legal right to live
and work in this country. The story of British immigration laws is the story
of the legal attempt o prevent British subjects of the wrong skin colour from
exercising their legal rights.
The dilemma that policy makers faced was well expressed in a secret 1950 Cabinet
committee report:
Any solution depending on an apparent... colour test would be so invidious as to make it impossible for adoption... Nevertheless, the use of any powers taken to restrict the free entry of British subjects to this country would, as a general rule, be more or less confined to coloured persons.
In other words, immigration controls only made sense if they were discriminatory
but they could not be openly seen to be so. The solution was found when Britain
introduced its first immigration law in 1962. Formally, the law insisted that
any immigrant to this country must first possess an employment voucher - so
it appeared non-racial, simply matching people to jobs. But in private, policy
makers were clear that the real aim was to stop non-white immigration. As
Richard Crossman, a leading Labour Party thinking, wrote in his diaries, 'we
have become illiberal... at a time of acute shortage of labour'. Or as the
Conservative spokesman Reginald Maudling put it, 'The problem arises quite
simply from the arrival in this country of many people of wholly alien cultures,
habits and outlooks'. This tactic of presenting social concerns about immigration
in the guise of a concern about numbers or job availiability has continued
over the past 50 years.
The perception that immigrants were alien to the British way of life ensured
that the relationship between immigrants and the British state was defined
largely by hostility, racism and confrontation. Not only was immigration policy
driven by the desire specifically to keep out non-whites, but the state also
viewed non-white immigrants settled in Britain as undesirables. Immigrants
were the problem, and that problem had to be policed. This led both to discrimination
against blacks and Asians in every sphere of social life, including housing,
education and employment, and to confrontations with the police, confrontations
that came to an explosive climax in a series of major riots in Britain's inner
cities in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The authorities recognised that
unless black and Asian communities were given a political stake in the system,
their frustration could threaten the stability of British cities.
In response to the riots, the authorities, initially at the local level, and
subsequently at the national level, pioneered a new strategy of inclusion.
They organised consultations with minority communities, set up new political
structures to allow dialogue between state institutions and minority organisations,
recognised community leaders as genuine political representatives and channelled
public funding through such leaders and organisations.
This process also helped redefine the idea of Britishness. It had been recognised
for some time that the old notion of Britishness, rooted in ideas of race
and Empire, could not be sustained. But nothing new had come to replace it.
In the 1980s, this absence came to be take as something positive. Britain
came to be seen not as a unitary nation, but as a multicultural society: a
'community of communities' as the Parekh report put it. Minorities, many came
to argue, should not be forced to accept British values, or to adopt a British
identity. Rather different peoples should have the right to express their
identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue
their own lifestyles.
Cultural difference came to be seen not as a threat to national identity,
as it had been in the 1950s, but as an affirmation of it. Britishness had
become reformulated as the toleration, even celebration, of cultural differences.
What was once seen as the inability of immigrants to integrate, now became
viewed as the flourishing of a multicultural society, part of the patchwork
of what it was to be British.
These developments, from the 1980s onwards, transformed the debate about immigration
by transforming the relationship between the state and the non-white minorities.
The racism that marked Britain when I was growing up now barely exists. This
is not to say discrimination has disappeared. But racism is not what defines
the relationship between the state and minorities as it had previously.
But the new Britain has created a new set of problems and anxieties. The transformation
of Britain has taken place not so much because minorities have come to be
treated as everyone else but more because, in a way, everyone else has come
to be treated like minorities. In the postwar years immigrants were seen as
different and therefore a threat to Britishness. Today difference has become
the lingua franca of politics and, indeed, of Britishness itself.
Multiculturalism gave an institutional form to what we now call identity politics.
Policy makers came to treat people less as British citizens than as members
of particular racial, ethnic, cultural or faith groups, and to define policy
largely in terms of the perceived needs and desires of those groups. And people
came to see themselves in that way too - not as British citizens but as Muslims,
or African Caribbeans, or Scottish.
Two consequences flowed from these developments. First, there has been increasing
conflict between identity groups. Britain today is less defined by confrontation
between the state and minority groups, than by conflict between those groups.
Because Britain is seen as a community of communities, so each group seeks
to maximise its interests at the expense of others, creating animosity.
Second, there is a greater disengagement between individuals and the political
process. Because individuals are often treated not as citizens but as members
of particular groups, so they feel less inclined to think of themselves as
citizens or to see to political process as being of great value. This is particularly
so because elected politicians have effectively abandoned their responsibility
for engaging directly with Britain's communities. Instead they have subcontracted
their responsibilities out to so-called community leaders who act as intermediaries.
When the Prime Minister, for instance, want to find out what Muslims thinks
about a particular issue, or wants to get a message to 'the Muslim comunity',
he invites the British Council of Muslims to No 10 (or at least he did until
the MCB fell out of political favour). It is an approach that suggests that
of all the interests British Muslims may have - in health, education, etc
- only their faith really matters. Rather than appealing to Muslims as British
citizens, and attempting to draw them into the mainstream political process,
politicians prefer to see them as people whose primarily loyalty is to their
faith and who can be politically engaged only by other Muslims.
The creation of new tensions and conflicts, and the greater degree of political
disengagement, has led to a new debate about social cohesion and national
identity. These new debates have coincided with the arrival of a new wave
of migrants, largely from Eastern Europe. Just as in the 1950s, the presence
of the new immigrants has become a lightning rod for the wider concerns. So,
rather than see the problems of political disengagement and social conflict
as the result of policy decisions taken over the past two decades, they have
come to be seen as the result of immigration creating too much diversity.
Unlike in the 1950s, immigrants to Britain today are generally of the same
skin colour as indigenous Britons; and black and Asians Britons are, ironically,
often as hostile to the newcommers as are white Britons. The fear today is
not that the new immigrants will undermine a racial conception of Britishness,
but that too much cultural diversity will undermine social cohesion and make
it more difficult to create a common national identity. Hence the government
has introduced Britishness tests to ensure that immigrants know what it is
to be British and citizenship ceremonies make them feel part of the national
story.
But perhaps the most striking difference between now and the 1950s, is that
50 years ago the fear was of immigrants becoming permanently attached to Britain.
Ironically, many of the initial immigrants were single men who expected to
return home after a short time working here. But once the 1962 Immigration
Act came into force they had no choice but to settle here and bring their
families over, because if they left they might never have been able to get
back in again.
Today, on the other hand, migrants from the EU have, in principle at least,
freedom of movement. Poles, for instance, can flit between Britain and Poland
as they wish - the so-called Ryanair migrants. As a result a much lower proportion
of the new immigrants are likely to settle. And that is what concerns today's
critics of immigration: that Ryanair migrants will make Britain more fragmented,
less integrated. In reality of course, they are not the cause of fragmentation,
simply a symbol of the anxieties about social cohesion.
In the 1950s, immigration controls were viewed as a means of preserving a
racialised form of British identity. Today they are seen as tools, not of
preserving racial identity, but of managing cultural diversity and creating
a more coherent society. But one thing that debates about immigration throughout
the past half century have had in common is that they have not really been
about immigration at all. There is an important debate to be had about immigration.
Unfortunately it is the not the debate in which politicians, policy makers
and the public have been engaged.