Abstract
Since the introduction of immigration controls in Britain in the early 20th century, racially and sexually discriminatory practices have been used by the British authorities to filter incoming migrants according to their level of desirability to the state. This chapter charts the introduction of immigration control legislation in the UK and the development of discriminatory policies that have become more restrictive since the first legislative Act was introduced in 1905. It will be argued that the purpose of controls has been to restrict entry for those considered ‘undesirable’ to the British nation-state and that these controls have imposed rigorous scrutiny upon potential migrants. At the same time, the chapter will show that, despite the aspiration of the authorities to screen and carefully select the migrant intake, the path towards development of the modern immigration control system, with its cornerstone being the Immigration Act 1971, has not been so straightforward and that the legislative process, negotiating between populist anti-immigrant sentiment and other socio-economic, legal, diplomatic and humanitarian concerns, has been haphazard. However, the end result of this has been a bipartisan consensus between the Conservatives and Labour that good race relations can only be maintained through strict immigration control.
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Notes
For a good overview of the history of British immigration policy, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984)
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
Ian R.G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of a Multi-Racial Britain (London: Routledge, 1997).
Discussion of the exclusionary debates sunounding the Aliens Act 1905 can be found in Steve Cohen, It’s the Same Old Story: Immigration Controls against Jewish, Black and Asian People, with Special Reference to Manchester (Manchester: Manchester City Council, 1987)
Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration & British Society, 187–1971 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988)
Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Abacus, 2006) pp. 250–275.
L. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) p. 60.
See Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
Solomos, ‘The Politics of Immigration Since 1945’, in Peter Braham, Ali Ratt ansi and Richard Skellington (eds), Racism and Anti-Racism: Inequalities, Opportunities and Policies (London: Sage Publications, 1992) p. 9.
Lydia Lindsey, ‘Halting the Tide: Responses to West Indian Immigration to Britain, 1946–1952’, Journal of Caribbean History, 26/1, 1992, p. 63.
Figures calculated from those given in Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London: Paladin, 1992) p. 331
Robert Miles, ‘The Racialization of British Politics’, Political Studies, 38, 1990, pp. 281–282.
Kenneth Lunn, ‘The British State and Immigration, 194551: New Light on the Empire Windrush,’, in Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (eds), The Politics of Marginality: Race, the Radical Right and Minorities in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1990) p. 172.
Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, ‘The 1951–55 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’, Immigrants and Minorities, 6/3, November 1987, p. 336.
For further information about the 1958 Notting Hill riots, see Robert Miles, ‘The Riots of 1958: Notes on the Ideological Construction of “Race Relations” as a Political Issue in Britain’, Immigrants & Minorities 3/3, 1984, pp. 252–275
S. Joshi and B. Carter, ‘The Role of Labour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’, Race & Class, 25/3, 1984, p. 58
See Joshi and Carter, ‘The Role of Labour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’; Shamit Saggar, ‘Integration and Adjustment: Britain’s Liberal Settlement Revisited’, in David Lowe (ed.), Immigration and Integration: Australia and Britain (London: Bureau of Immigration Multicultural and Population Research/Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 1995) pp. 105–131
M.D.A. Freeman and Sarah Spencer, ‘Immigration Control, Black Workers and the Economy,’ British Journal of Law & Society, 6, 1979, pp. 65.
Zig Layton-Henry The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’Relations in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p. 38.
Paul, Whitewashing Britain, p. 157; Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, p. 101; Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004) p. 280.
Robert Moore, Racism and Black Resistance in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1975) p. 27.
Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea, White Man’s Country: Racism in British Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1984) p. 42.
Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) pp. 174–175
Peter Alexander, Racism, Resistance and Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1987) pp. 34–35.
Richard Grossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. 1: Minister of Housing 1964–1966 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975) pp. 149–150.
John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003) p. 60
Zig Layton-Henry The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’Relations in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) p. 79.
Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990) p. 201.
Caroline Knowles, Race, Discourse and Labourism (London: Routledge, 1992) p. 94.
Cited in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of February 1974 (London: Macmillan, 1974) p. 10.
John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones and Paul Gilroy, ‘The Organic Crisis of British Capitalism and Race: The Experience of the Seventies’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1986) p. 23.
Reiko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 165.
A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1982) p. 27.
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© 2014 Evan Smith and Marinella Marmo
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Smith, E., Marmo, M. (2014). Decolonisation and the Creation of the British Immigration Control System. In: Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280442_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280442_2
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