A hundred years ago the official statisticians of the United Kingdom turned foreigners into aliens. The change transpired in the headings of table columns in printed reports of the kingdom's census that recorded the number of people who were present in the country and did not have the British nationality. In 1911 they had been classified as foreigners, but ten years later they were listed as aliens, leading, for example, to the heading ‘Alien nationality (and nationality not stated)’. However, the substitution was not implemented consistently across all reports; a census reporter stated in an introduction to the published figures on Nottingham: ‘Foreigners born in Germany were 258 in 1911, and are now reduced to 65.’

Perhaps the Nottingham reporter wanted to avoid using the word alien. From a post-1921 point of view –before alien generally acquired an additional new meaning as in extraterrestrial3 –alien appears more hostile than foreigner and the word carries an antagonistic denotation.

The census change from foreigner to alien may have been an application of the prevailing legal terminology, as in ‘an alien is a citizen of another country’. The Aliens Act of 1905 could have given rise to the term. However, that raises the question why the term was not applied in the 1911 census documents. The answer may be that a stronger impetus for change was needed. The First World War could have provided that momentum. As a result of the war and its outcomes, the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 and the Alien Order 1920 had come into force, emphasising the prevalence of alien in contemporary statutes.

On the other hand, the census change may also have arisen from the influence of a debate on immigration that preceded the 1905 Aliens Act, lasted well into the twentieth century and resurfaced in the twenty-first. The discourse grew in strength during the second half of the nineteenth century, when concerns rose about an increasing presence of immigrants in Britain. The debate used the word alien, and some participants voiced strong opinions on immigrants, which could have caused the census modification.