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

Migration, and Migratory Myths 17
in other European countries, the great bulk of the migrants organised their
own journeys and paid their fares. Until the Commonwealth Immigrants Act
in 1962 (see Chapter 2) they could enter Britain to settle and work without
restrictions. As a slogan of the 1970s Asian Youth Movement pointed out,
‘We are here because you were there.’ The initial movement of Caribbean
people to Britain after the Second World War was prompted by their wartime
experiences in Britain. After the war they came, or returned, in boats,
mostly returning troop ships, dressed in their best clothes, some of them still
in uniform. On the most famous of these boats, the Windrush, which arrived
in June 1948, about two-thirds of the migrants had served in Britain during
the war. The majority were skilled, with some vocational training; they came
mainly from towns rather than rural areas. According to an Economist Intelligence
Unit Survey published in 1961 and cited in Nicholas Deakin’s Colour,
Citizenship and British Society, only 12 per cent of a sample of 603 West
Indians had been unemployed before leaving the West Indies. On the other
hand little had been done to resettle West Indians who were repatriated to the
Caribbean after the war, and British rule had created a large amount of
unemployment in the population as a whole. A pamphlet published by
Lambeth Council, Forty Winters On: Memories of Britain’s Post War Caribbean
Immigrants, quotes Sam King, a former RAF leading aircraftman, as follows:
Many of us were unemployed and we decided to take the first ship back to England.
My family were farmers with a bit of land in Portland, Jamaica, and if I hadn’t left
I’d be a peasant farmer today. But having been in England and read a few books I
decided I could not live in a colony ...
Only one man in ten had the vote and 85 per cent of the land belonged to big
English landowners ...
The fare was £28.10s and my family had to sell three cows to raise the money ...
We heard there was consternation in parliament and that newspapers like the
Daily Graphic and the Express were saying we should be turned back. It was a Labour
Government and the Colonial Secretary Creech Jones said, ‘These people have British
passports and they must be allowed to land.’
But then he added on, ‘There’s nothing to worry about because they won’t last one
winter in England.’ It gives me some satisfaction to be able to repeat his words 40
winters later ...
... For those who had nowhere to go the deep air raid shelter at Clapham Common
was made available for accommodation and the authorities helped in finding work.
Within three weeks each person had a job ...
Immigration from the Indian subcontinent followed. It too had some of its
origins in war-time recruitment, especially of seamen from Punjab, Kashmir
and Sylhet who had replaced merchant sailors recruited into the army. Some
seamen were stranded in Britain during the war and found work in factories.
As Ian Spencer comments in his book British Immigration Policy since 1939,
There is little doubt that the sailors who settled in ports and moved inland during the
war provided the basis for the post-war development of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani
communities in Britain. As they developed in the 1950s and 1960s, Bangladeshi and