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.

Introduction

Chapter 2 discussed how the inferiorization and infantilization of many countries in the Global South make ‘helping’ discourses attractive and marketable to individual volunteer tourists, and how successive crises in Nepal have historically created opportunities for predatory capitalism. In both cases, the disadvantages endured by Nepalis have been appropriated by Western actors. This chapter pursues this theme further by considering the dynamics of Western dominance and superiority in international development and aid policy. It discusses the growth and aggressive professionalization of the humanitarian sector and how this degrades both the scope and the quality of aid actually going towards improving the everyday lives of beneficiaries and creates desirable jobs and elite lifestyles for foreign third-sector workers. The chapter critiques the developmentalist emphasis on tourism as an area for growth and questions the validity of arguments for constant economic growth in general, outlining the environmental and social unsustainability of this approach and how this is felt most by inhabitants of ‘the periphery’. These debates are framed as ‘globalization from above’, which is a neoliberal system designed to serve the interests of wealthy nations at the expense of poorer ones and is used as a tool for embedding and superioritizing Western liberal discourse. Tourism development and the rise of the voluntourism sector in Nepal are explored in relation to hegemonic development frameworks and interests, which routinely leave recipient countries with diminished autonomy and prosperity.

Aid Dependency Cycles

International aid has long played a contested and much-debated role in many socio-economically marginalized economies. It includes emergency aid, such as money and resources given as relief following natural disasters and distributed by charities and NGOs on the ground, as well as money paid in the form of loans and grants between governments or to recipient countries via the World Bank and other multilateral organizations. There is a bitter dispute about the effectiveness of aid and its implications for recipient countries. The main players in these debates belong, broadly speaking, to two polarized teams. In the briefest (and admittedly oversimplified) terms, one side believes that aid is central to economic prosperity in poor countries, and that aid levels should be increased to achieve this (e.g. Sachs 2005; Stiglitz 2002).

Chapter 4 discussed the issues surrounding universal children's rights legislation and the complexities of its local implementation and imposition on the Global South. Western bias, cultural insensitivity and inadequate jurisprudence have been raised as practical, legal and ethical problems, and critique has also been levelled at the broader notion of an essentialized, unified childhood. To those ends, the impossibility of a ‘globalized childhood’ has been outlined, owing to highly varied and finely nuanced childhood contexts in Nepal and the wider ‘majority world’.

This chapter takes up the issues of oversimplification and reductiveness in relation to the countless interventions by international agencies, campaign groups, states, academics and third-sector organizations claiming to identify, quantify and solve single-issue problems. First, the chapter outlines the genesis of anti-trafficking and modern slavery legislation and discusses its significance on international humanitarian agendas. It presents critiques of the methods used by stakeholders to attract attention and resources, examining the discursive power of sensationalist campaigns to combat complex and historically embedded issues related to poverty. The chapter goes on to highlight the problematic approach of many campaigns aiming to abolish orphanage tourism on the grounds of its connection to child trafficking and modern slavery. Neo-abolitionist agendas routinely and uncritically reproduce these heavily contested terms and questionable metrics, especially the Global Slavery Index (GSI) for their own popular, political and financial gains. The chapter examines these and other forms of rescue rhetoric in a range of sources ranging from high-profile academic and thirdsector collaborations to the rescue operations of individual NGOs in Nepal.

The Palermo Trafficking Protocol

The mid-1990s saw a surge in academic, political and legal interest in human trafficking, as anxieties around international organized crime and prostitution grew when Global North states felt under threat following the collapse of Communist regimes in central and eastern Europe (Mai 2010). The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (also known as the Palermo Trafficking Protocol) is a protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and entered into force in December 2003.

Introduction

In this book, I do not set out to construct tourism orphanages as a panacea or even as straightforwardly favourable to alternative options for children born into poverty. I have discussed other forms of harmful work undertaken by poor children that do not bring some of the potential benefits of orphanage tourism, including schooling, socialization and regular meals. Yet at the same time, I acknowledge the importance of discussing the potential comparatively beneficial elements of growing up in orphanage tourism carefully, in order to advance a fuller understanding than the dominant modern slavery framework presents.

Extensive research has shown that institutional care can cause emotional and psychological damage to children, which is often stored up and does not manifest until adolescence or adulthood. As the first part of this chapter will show, these problems are well evidenced in a wealth of literature from across the disciplines of child development studies, sociology, psychology and education, as well as in more recent research on orphanage tourism. Many campaign groups outline the emotional harms caused to children in orphanage tourism, especially in terms of the painful and confusing departure of volunteers with whom they have formed bonds. Though no longitudinal studies exist to date to support this, tentative arguments have been made about the risks to children exposed to short-term caregivers. Zeanah, Wilke, Shauffer, Rochat, Howard and Dozier (2019) draw on evidence from related contexts such as foster care to postulate that ‘attachment disruptions’ in orphanage tourism pose risks to children. They argue that:

Empirical research on commercial orphanages connected to the orphanage tourism sector has, however, also shown that there is more ambiguity surrounding the potential harms, which often sit, whether comfortably or not, alongside a host of more positive and beneficial factors for child development and wellbeing. There are distinctions to be made between the traditional orphanages explored in the literature cited above and those where ‘paper orphans’ are exploited for financial gain. There are also important differences and overlaps between commercial orphanages and the children's homes where rescued children are taken and housed by third-sector organizations, which are typically presented as a solution to the problem of orphanage tourism.

Introduction

As noted in Chapter 1, orphanage tourism is a growing niche in the wider volunteer tourism trend in the Global South, where orphanages can provide a last resort for struggling families. Nepali families living at, or below, official poverty lines often require their children to work, and crises such as conflict, drought, flood and other natural disasters can push families into deeper poverty and towards evermore desperate measures. Orphanage tourism is one of many markets to emerge around the needs of poor families and the supply of child labour this supports. Commercial orphanages that offer volunteering placements to tourists rely on a steady stream of visitors from affluent countries who are prepared to pay significant sums of money for the opportunity to undertake charitable work with children.

As with many other tourism markets in low-income countries, such as ‘tribal’ tourism to indigenous communities in Vietnam or paying to fire rocket launchers at live cows in Cambodia, tourists behave in ways that would be unthinkable and impossible in their home countries. In poorer, post- or mid-crisis contexts, norms, codes and laws are often (or often assumed to be) more relaxed, meaning that tourists can use their position of relative power in the consumer markets of tourism to explore and indulge their whims and fantasies with impunity. Indeed, partaking in such markets can be valorizing and status-enhancing when tourism experiences and landscapes are aestheticized by ‘cultural intermediaries’ for the reproduction of distinction (Bourdieu 1984). The global supply and demand chains in various niche tourism markets function because of multiple social, economic and political factors that make these activities possible. Widespread marginalization and disenfranchisement of minority indigenous groups in Vietnam, for example, allows for their objectification, which is taken up by foreign tourists seeking out unusual and Orientalist experiences of the ‘primitive’ (Bott 2018). Similarly, relaxed and poorly enforced gun and animal welfare laws in Cambodia make the outer extremes of ‘dark tourism’ possible for those who can afford to explore the ‘edges’ of mainstream tourism (Robinson 2005) by obliterating cattle. Even when tourism practices are illegal and/or morally and socially unacceptable, as is the case with child sex tourism, a blind eye is often turned by communities and authorities of states that rely on tourism revenue for survival.

The previous chapters have established and explored the socioeconomic, historical, geopolitical and symbolic landscapes of Nepal, especially the ways in which they have contributed to Nepal becoming an orphanage tourism destination that has the necessary conditions for such a market to exist. Discussions have considered Nepal's relationships with global systems of aid and humanitarian intervention, and with international tourism development and markets, arguing that acknowledging the peculiarities of such relationships is key to understanding orphanage tourism and other emergent tourism and labour niches. The availability of children and child labour is of course central to the orphanage tourism industry, and children's broader position in the context outlined above is also crucial.

This chapter deepens the emphasis on context by interrogating the realities of childhood in Nepal, and the unavoidable necessity for many children to work in order for them and/or their families to survive. It outlines critical debates in childhood, child labour and children's rights, locating ‘orphans’ working in orphanage tourism therein. Discussions will question Western frameworks of childhood, which largely fail to meaningfully acknowledge the contextual conditions of childhood, instead framing it as a discrete, homogenous life stage that requires universal measures of protection. This abstract understanding of childhood has received critical interrogation because of the vastly differential conditions in which children grow up, and this chapter will show that through the contextualization of childhood in Nepal in relation to the conditions of poverty and dependency outlined in Chapter 3, childhood emerges as a more f lexible and heterogeneous life-stage, which is negotiated as needs and limits dictate and possibilities permit.

Constructed Childhood

In most parts of the world, childhood is legally defined as the period between birth and 18 years, or the equivalent ‘age of majority’ in respective countries. The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as declared in law, usually 16 or 18 years. It signals the acquisition of control of one's own person, actions and decisions, and marks the termination of legal guardianship by parents or guardians.

As a critical tourism scholar with particular concern with how destinations are imagined and altered for tourist consumption and local people's responses to such, I have a longstanding interest in tourism in Nepal. Like many popular destinations in poorer parts of the world, Nepal is constructed and commoditized as an opportunity for immersion in rich cultural heritage and spectacular scenery. It is home to eight of the world's tallest mountains and is famous for world-class mountaineering, trekking, rafting and other adventure activities. Its strong Hindu and Buddhist heritage means that Nepal is famous for its many temples, monasteries and stupas, and in combination with the spiritual allure of the Himalayas and the often-cited warmth and hospitability of Nepali people, Nepal is perhaps uniquely imbued with mythical appeal to tourists seeking an ‘authentic’ travel experience.

My earlier work on adventure tourism in Nepal and my wider research on the idealization and romanticization of places and their people under the influence of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002) led me to explore the power of globalized tourism markets to construct and control geographical locations, often in ways that Orientalize, Other and sometimes endanger their inhabitants (Bott 2009, 2012, 2018). Tourists are sold holidays through photoshopped, sanitized and highly selective depictions, which mostly airbrush over the realities of daily life in popular destinations, many of which are found in the world's least economically developed countries (LEDCs) in the Global South.

Paradoxically, even when poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ are themselves commoditized, as is the case in niche areas such as slum tourism and ‘tribal’ tourism, the political economies of countries are largely hidden from formations and mediations of ‘dream’ holidays. There is a deliberate segregation of the problems faced by people living in difficult circumstances and the gratifying elements of holidays, which are designed to represent an embodied departure from the realities of everyday life. During my earlier ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan foothills and at Everest basecamp, I had observed the extraordinary measures provided to buffer tourists from cold temperatures and provide them with Western luxuries. I watched helicopter loads of Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, firewood and battery-farmed eggs being unloaded and carried uphill by porters in basket loads weighing more than they did.

This book draws on several periods of research, including two periods of qualitative research carried out in Nepal in 2018 and 2020, whose primary aims were to explore the complexities of the industry, foregrounding the experiences and voices of young adults who have spent time in orphanages in Nepal. These concerns stemmed from my witnessing the emergence of Western discourses surrounding orphanage tourism and the omission of the voices of the residents themselves in recent theoretical and policy advancements. Modern slavery and child-trafficking frameworks have the potential to dominate orphanage tourism discourse, and the book has critiqued understandings that do not meaningfully engage with the group in question but are becoming paradigmatically entrenched.

Research on orphanage tourism in the Global South that fails to engage with local voices and context constitutes a manifestation of the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2007) characteristic of much Western intervention as discussed throughout this book. Western research in non-Western contexts has a problematic history of applying predatory, oppressive and pathologizing methods and analytical lenses (Sinclair 2003; Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021) and is inextricably bound up with legacies of colonial exploitation (Smith 2021). Postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies are needed to inform better empirical understandings and open what Couze Venn calls ‘critical spaces for new narratives of becoming and emancipation’ (Venn 2006, 1), which are critical to undoing Western material and discursive domination.

The research, therefore, adopted a decolonial epistemological approach, which centres on the experiences and worldviews of non-Western actors, in this instance, young Nepalis, and respects the cultural context of their lives (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021). To those ends, I have illustrated the relevance of the social, cultural and economic context of orphanage tourism in Nepal and have tried to locate the narratives of former residents therein.

I adopted a critically reflexive approach to developing the research design based on a pilot study I undertook in Kathmandu in 2018, which led me to re-evaluate the methodological and ethical implications it raised alongside the empirical avenues it opened. Lessons learned from the pilot study included moving beyond simply recognizing my privileged position as a white Western researcher working in a southern tourism setting, and towards decentring myself from the research process as far as possible.

The central argument of this book is that orphanage tourism is adopted and co-opted into numerous campaigns and discourses in ways that partly, if not predominantly, serve the interests of intervenors by generating certain rewards: gaining power, status, repute, funding, identity and so on. Meanwhile, the subjectivities of youth involved are sidelined and overlooked. Chapters have presented a range of paradigms and contexts through which this argument is made. In that regard, the book contributes to a growing body of work that critiques interventions performed by the ‘rescue industry’ and international/ multinational interventions that can do more harm than good on account of poor understanding, little or no local consultation, dubious metrics and questionable goals and frameworks. As I have argued throughout, the urge to rescue ‘paper orphans’ by volunteers, INGOs or abolitionists chiefly rests on the blunt assumption that the Global South is needy of a saviour, and the Global North is well equipped to perform the task.

In this relationship, the saviour – whether voluntourist, humanitarian, academic, governmental or state – assumes the role of hero, or protagonist, in the story they narrate about themself and their own goals and achievements. The narrative relies on an object to pity, rescue and redeem, and the orphan child fulfils this role well because of historical and contemporary constructions of orphanhood, childhood vulnerability and the assumed sanctity of family life. The racialized dynamic of the orphan/rescuer relationship further enhances the imagined potential of the West to reform, rescue and restore the ‘Other’. This reproduction of victimhood connects to Teju Cole's notion of a ‘white saviour industrial complex’, which compels Westerners to have ‘a big emotional experience that validates privilege’ (Cole 2012, 1). According to Cole, ‘the white saviour supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon and receives awards in the evening’ (Ibid.). Cole's thesis was originally made in response to White hegemony in Western humanitarian aid, but the concept is applicable in other ways. Anderson, Knee and Mowatt argue that the idea of White hegemonic groups seeking ‘to do good while also satisfying their own emotional needs can also apply to leisure research and practice’ (2021, 531). They employ Cole's framework to identify the enactment of White saviourism in international volunteer tourism.

Resilience is a word and an attribute that is increasingly becoming more and more familiar in the world of leadership. After all, one cannot be expected to always win in every situation. There are plenty of times when one ends up snatching a loss from the jaws of victory—I know the expression probably seems a little lopsided to most readers, but I’ve always found it deliciously ironic. In a situation of failure, most people would be reasonably expected to be rather devastated. The ability to bounce back from failure is what resilience is all about. If one has to define resilience, then usually the definition involves the ability to face or respond to a failure or a drawback of some kind. Resilience could be on a continuum of course—for instance, a person may be resilient in one area, but less so in another area. However, from a leadership perspective, resilience is often thought to be one of the components of psychological capital or PsyCap as it is popularly acronymized as.

PsyCap basically refers to the internal resources a person has in order to be able to manage difficult or turbulent situations. It consists of four components, namely hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism. As you can see, each component of it helps people tackle tough times. For instance, a person definitely needs a healthy dose of optimism and hope when facing tough times, and similarly needs to be confident in one's own ability to eventually be successful. The resilience piece specifically deals with how a person can deal with and overcome challenging or stressful circumstances, and still be able to forge forward.

Dogs are among nature's most resilient animals, and many-a-dog has displayed amazing tenacity and the ability to bounce back from really awful and harrowing situations. That ability to bounce back from emotionally or physically draining activities and incidents is what resilience is all about. Although, one could make the case, that possessing high levels of overall psychological capital is an essential recipe for being able to bounce back from failure and go on to a successful outcome.