Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

14 Open Borders
by the Norman invasion of 1066. Jewish people migrated to Britain soon
after and were confined by restrictive laws to occupations such as medicine
and money-lending, in which they became useful to their rulers as a source
of finance for their military adventures.
When manufacturing industry began to develop in Britain its labour needs
were supplied mainly through migration from rural areas within Britain.
From the fifteenth century onwards, ‘enclosures’ of common land and
peasant evictions carried out by landlords created large numbers of landless
people who had, as Karl Marx put it, nothing to sell but their labour power.
The existence of a displaced rural population was one factor which
accounted for the early success of the industrial revolution in Britain. A large
pool of workers was available for the new urban factories, as well as to build
railways, power plants and other infrastructure. Some migration within
Britain from rural areas into urban employment continued in the twentieth
century. For example, Welsh people moved to Slough in the 1930s, forming
a quarter of its population. Others travelled, sometimes on foot, to work in the
car factories in Oxford, and were followed by their relatives once they became
established there. The 1980s recessions and industrial closures produced a
new group of internal migrants who have followed the advice of the Conservative
former minister Lord Tebbitt to ‘get on their bikes’ in search of
work, travelling in most cases from the north of Britain to cities in the south.
The practice of inviting or compelling workers and craftspeople from
overseas to remedy the absence of British labour and skills has a long history.
Some early immigrants came in response to the desires of kings and
noblemen for weapons, artefacts and adornments; from the sixteenth
century onwards black slaves were imported as servants. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Dutch people came to Britain and set up textile,
pottery and brewing industries, partly to escape the persecution of
Protestants on the continent. From the late seventeenth to the mideighteenth
centuries, many Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled
persecution in France; between 40,000 and 50,000 settled in England. In a
work edited by H. E. Malden and published in 1905, A History of Surrey, the
contribution to manufacturing industry in Lambeth made by the ‘huge
immigrations’ of Dutch, French and Scots is described:
the later extension of this district, the multiplication of the industries carried on within
it, and the various degrees of excellence which many of them ultimately attained,
have been largely due to the influence of the foreign workmen who at successive
stages of our history came to settle within our country.
From the early nineteenth century, people also migrated to Britain from rural
poverty in Italy and Ireland. Migration from Ireland on a large scale started
with the potato famine under British rule, and grew with the continuing
underdevelopment of Ireland by the English. By 1861 there were over
600,000 Irish-born people in England and Wales, about 3 per cent of the
population, and a further 200,000 in Scotland, about 7 per cent of the