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

Migration, and Migratory Myths 15
population. After Irish independence and partition in 1921 migration
continued. Irish people have not been treated as aliens under immigration
rules and they have full citizenship rights.
During the Second World War the British government recruited colonial
labour to work in forestry, munitions factories and the services. According
to Zig Layton-Henry in his book The Politics of Immigration, a group of 1,200
British Hondurans were recruited to fell timber in Scotland and about 1,000
Caribbean technicians and trainees were recruited to work in munitions
factories in Merseyside and Lancashire. Although during the Second World
War the army and navy exercised a colour bar, turning down volunteers
from the empire and attempting to confine recruitment to people ‘of pure
European descent’, many Caribbeans, Asians and Africans did fight in the
British armed forces, and the air force was forced by shortages to recruit
around 13,500 Caribbeans to work in Britain as ground crews. In addition,
thousands of seamen from the colonies were either recruited or enlisted
voluntarily in the merchant navy. This war-time experience introduced
people to Britain who had previously had no contacts with the ‘mother
country’. When they were demobilised or their employment ended the
government attempted to repatriate them. But some stayed in Britain and
others, when they returned to the Caribbean, found there were no jobs.
After the war the British Labour government initially saw unemployment
as a continuing problem and a justification for restrictionist immigration
policies. It came to realise that a ‘labour shortage’ was imminent which might
cause breakdowns in public transport and the health services. Nevertheless,
after setting up a working party in 1948 to consider, among other things, the
question of Jamaican unemployment and British labour shortages, the
government decided not to organise large-scale immigration of non-white
colonial workers on the grounds that they would be difficult to ‘assimilate’.
Recruitment from British colonies and ex-colonies took place on a small scale.
The London Transport Executive made an agreement with the Barbadian
Immigrants’ Liaison Service, and several thousand Barbadians were given
loans to cover their fares to Britain. As late as 1966 London Transport
recruited workers in Trinidad and Jamaica. The British Hotels and Restaurants
Association recruited workers from Barbados. Woolf’s rubber factory in
Southall recruited workers from Punjab, and northern textile companies
advertised for workers in the Indian and Pakistani press. Before the war the
Ministry of Health had recruited nurses and hospital domestic workers from
the Caribbean; this practice continued after the war. Enoch Powell, when he
was Conservative health minister from 1960 to 1963, continued to recruit
doctors and nurses from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan, thus benefiting
from the resources devoted by those countries to their training. In the House
of Commons on 8 May 1963 Powell commented on:
the large numbers of doctors from overseas who come to add to their experience in
our hospitals, who provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of