Human migration is defined here as a comprehensive process of a movement of people within and between geographic spaces. The background, direction, depth and result of this process encompass factors within the regions of origin and destination as well as regions crossed during the movement from origin to destination. Like integration of immigrants, as defined above, it is usually a complex, long-term and multidimensional process, which occurs throughout history.

Migration

Detailed definitions of ‘migration’ are provided by dictionaries and other lexical resources, such as The Historical Thesaurus of English. The Thesaurus charts the development of use and meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It aims to include almost every word in English recorded from early medieval times to the present day, arranged in detailed hierarchies of meaning. It records ‘migration’ as a noun under ‘Society’ (‘Furnishing with inhabitants’). With this meaning ‘migration’ was used since 1527. A later meaning occurs from 1611: change of place of a thing. ‘Migration’ can have the sense of ‘movement’, which itself is listed since the fourteenth century, with ‘transmigration’ listed since the seventeenth century.

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines ‘migration’ as a change of residence or habitat, removal or transit from one locality to another, especially over a distance. The English word came from the Latin migrationem (a removal, change of abode). ‘Migration’ is a noun of action from the past participle stem of migrare (to move from one place to another).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists ‘migration’ as: 1. the action or an act of moving from one place to another and 2. the migrating of a person or a people from one country or place of residence to settle in another, or an instance of this. According to the OED, ‘migration’ can also involve animals, plant distribution or the random movement from one place to another by a cell, atom, molecule and so forth. All these meanings appear neutral. Similarly neutral are the definitions of ‘migration’ of humans in Merriam-Webster Dictionary – the act, process or an instance of migrating – and Collins English Dictionary – the act or an instance of migrating. However, Cambridge Dictionary7 defines ‘migration’ also as the process of people travelling to a new place to live, usually in large numbers.

After 1991, the direction, pace and scale of immigration into Britain changed. From less than 2 million in 1991, the foreign-born population in Britain as registered in the census rose to just under 10 million in 2021. The growth was uneven; between 1991 and 2001 it was over 1 million, sped up towards the end of the 1990s, reached almost 3 million between 2001 and 2011 and continued its upward trend. The proportion of people born abroad in the total UK population also increased, from just over 6 per cent in 1991, 8 in 2001, just over 12 in 2011 and 15 in 2021. In that year one in six residents of England and Wales was born outside the UK. Over half of the increase in the total population of England and Wales, from 56.1 million 2011 to 59.6 million in 2021, was the result of positive net migration – the number of people arriving in the UK minus the people leaving.

In terms of immigration Britain did not stand out internationally. Davies has stated that the 2001 proportion mentioned above was ‘a rather lower percentage’ compared to other European countries, such as France or Germany. And not all foreign-born individuals registered in the UK census can be regarded as immigrants who settled permanently in Britain. Many of them were students and short-term contract workers, who were expected to leave after their studies and contracts were finished or terminated earlier, although many of these individuals stayed in Britain, often with their families who had come over.

Nevertheless, the number of immigrants in Britain expanded dramatically between 1991 and 2021. The increasing proportional presence of immigrants appeared as emigration from Britain declined. The Times in 1962 mentioned a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit which stated that between 1951 and 1960 ‘net immigration into Britain was almost exactly balanced by the net outflow of United Kingdom citizens’. In 1964, 60,000 more people left the country than arrived here. Nine years later, the figure was 41,000. During the next 15 years an average of 5,000 more people per year emigrated from Britain than came here.

It's a ‘crisis’. In Calais thousands of migrants are preparing to cross the Channel. They hope to find work, attempting to overcome economic difficulties in their country of origin, but some are also fleeing for their lives, trying to escape persecution. According to British newspapers, such as the Nottingham Review, they have been met with ‘the greatest hostility’ in France. The migrants are not welcome in England either. After arriving here ‘wholly destitute’, hundreds of them are transported to distant countries, with which Britain has made special arrangements.

This tale of ill-fated migration sounds familiar to present-day newspaper readers. It has all the hallmarks of modern attitudes to migrants and official measures to stop them crossing the Channel or transport those who do cross, sending them to countries like Albania and Rwanda. But it happened in 1848, not the present.

In fact, it concerned lacemakers from Nottingham who had lost their jobs due to technical changes in lace production. During the 1830s thousands of them had migrated to Calais, where in 1848 they got caught up in unemployment and revolutionary disturbances. Their troubles were aggravated by a wave of Anglophobia. Many of the lacemakers wished to return to Britain. A British government enquiry was instigated. A charitable body, the Committee of Noblemen and Gentlemen for the Relief of British Workmen, Refugees from France, took up their cause and received royal support. A plan was forged to seek free passage for the lacemakers to emigrate to Australia. A public subscription raised funds to cover the expenses of the voyage. Colonial emigration commissioners relaxed regulations. Several hundred migrants left for Australia. However, on arrival there in 1849, they found little opportunity for lacemaking; the colony's economy was in recession and its labour market was overstocked. Life was hard and housing accommodation poor (in some instances worse than mud cabins). A few ended up minding sheep in the Australian outback, wishing they had never left England.

The Nottingham lacemakers were ill-fated migrants – a typical situation of immigrants who have the misfortune of arriving at a time of economic downturn, when they become a target of complaints in a receiving society.

In 1921 Britain had a sizeable immigrant population. It consisted of over 311,000 persons in England and Wales (0.8 per cent of the total population there of almost 38 million) and over 24,000 in Scotland (0.5 per cent of the total Scottish population of almost 5 million). The total foreign-born population of Britain had declined from just over 409,000 in 1911. If people born in Ireland are included, about 750,000 residents of England and Wales in 1921 were born abroad, forming 2 per cent of the total population – figures that rose to over 1 million (2.7 per cent) in 1931 and got close to 2 million (4.3 per cent) in 1951. The total number of foreigners would be significantly higher if it included visitors, sailors present in British ports, soldiers stationed in Britain and transmigrants passing through the country. Descendants of immigrants born in Britain were also numerous.

The immigrants arrived in Britain through different movements from a variety of countries. In 1911 and 1921 the largest group of foreign-born people in Britain was made up by individuals from Russia, Poland and the Baltic states, in total 110,000 in 1921. The second largest group in 1911 was from Germany – over 55,000 – but it fell to 22,000 in 1921. The number of Germans in Britain and people from Austria that had in 1938 become part of Germany rose again to 70,000 on the eve of the Second World War. Other sizeable groups came from the USA, France and Italy – each 40,000 before 1945 (from, respectively, 39,000, 34,000 and 26,000 in 1921). The US figure increased with American GIs in Britain after the Second World War. Throughout the period between 1921 and 1948 people from many other countries lived in Britain. For example, in 1921, just over 4,500 persons born in China were in Britain, increasing to over 12,500 in 1951, three years after the foundation of the People's Republic of China and the end of the Chinese Civil War, which had caused some Chinese refugees to flee to Britain, often via Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Immigration into Britain rose after the Second World War; some of it connected and some of it unconnected to earlier population movements, but all of it changed British society. Panayi has stated that after 1945, ‘the reality, regularity and scale of migration makes it a central factor in the evolution of [Britain]’. The diversity of immigration was also unprecedented. A million Irish moved here. New communities of hundreds of thousands of West Indian, South Asian and African people came into being. The Chinese population of Britain grew too. Meanwhile, immigration from the European continent continued, hundreds of thousands came from Poland and Italy, tens of thousands made their way from a variety of different European states, and others came from Cyprus and Malta.

However, this was also a period of large-scale emigration, with people leaving Britain to live abroad in countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, from which some later returned. During the interwar years, the number of people leaving Britain had probably been higher than the number coming in, but that changed in 1951, when the first census period was reported since 1871 in which more people immigrated into the UK than emigrated out of it. In the years between 1951 and 1961, immigration and emigration were reported as being almost equal.

Those who came to fill labour shortages and work in Britain during the first five years after the Second World War were largely welcomed, according to a 1951 editorial in The Times:

After that, there was occasional resistance to labourers from the continent. For example, in 1955 the Scottish branch of the National Union of Mineworkers opposed a plan to import 10,000 Italian workers in coalfields and condemned the plan ‘as a substitute’ for better wages and conditions and improved mechanisation in British mines.

This book aims to describe and analyse what has changed in public attitudes towards immigrants. With that objective in mind, it examines expressions of feelings about immigrants in Britain during the period between 1921 and 2021, and investigates how these attitudes were expressed, what words and phrases were used, in what context attitudes were articulated and where they came from.

In a broad sense, this description and analysis address a wider issue: If history is made by humans, what external influences direct their actions or are they guided by unchangeable basic instincts?

By focussing on one aspect of immigration history, namely the changes in how immigrants in Britain were perceived during the hundred years after 1921, this book also strives to contribute to the historiography on the integration of immigrants into modern Western societies. It hopes to increase knowledge and deepen understanding of the past, but this book also has a contemporary relevance, because attitudes to immigrants and their integration into the society of the country where they settle continue to be topics of debate.

This is not the first book on immigrants in Britain. Much research on this subject has been published, from comprehensive historical surveys to reviews of specific aspects of immigration, with attention usually focussed on specific groups, locations and periods. However, this book applies a rather new historical-linguistic approach with brief international comparisons to investigate the expression of attitudes to immigrants in Britain in the hundred years after 1921, revealing long-term developments, many of which started well before 1921. It also attempts to resolve an apparent contradiction in the existing literature: if Britain cannot be classified as a country in which immigrants faced unremitting hostility, how come negative views about immigrants remained fairly constant – was there really not much new under the sun or was the expression of attitudes to immigrants more fluid, despite seemingly obvious similarities between past and present? Furthermore, this study draws on primary sources that for this purpose have so far been relatively unused, such as newspapers and dictionaries, and analyses them with the help of the existing historical and linguistic literature.