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

18 Open Borders
Pakistani communities often owed their origins to a tiny number of early pioneers.
So strong was the process of chain migration that a population of several thousand
could be derived from a very small number of kinship groups related to perhaps only
a handful of villages. The original migrant would invariably have been financed by a
group of close kin and when successful that migrant would have used his savings to
help one of his close relatives to join him. They would soon be in a position to sponsor
other members of their kinship group whom they would also help with jobs and
accommodation on arrival. A study of the 2,000-strong Pakistani community in
Oxford reveals that almost all the migrants there can be accounted for by just two
chains, one of which began with a man who had settled in Glasgow during the Second
World War.
Asian immigration has been almost entirely from the Punjab and Gujarat in
India and from half a dozen areas in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Four-fifths of
the Indian migrants to Britain were Sikhs, mainly from two districts in East
Punjab, Jullundur and Hoshiarpur. Sikhs have traditionally been highly
mobile and form about a quarter of the Indian army. Some pressures to
migrate resulted from partition, which meant that Sikhs and Hindus were
driven out of the the rich wheat-producing farmland they had opened up in
what became West Pakistan, and were forced to subsist on much smaller
farms in East Punjab. Similarly, Gujaratis had a tradition of migration, in
particular to East Africa; virtually all of the Gujarati migrants were literate
and some were highly educated. The Pakistanis and Bangladeshis came
mainly from relatively poor hill districts, from Mirpur and Sylhet respectively,
and tended to be less literate. Communities originating in other parts of the
world were built in similar ways. For example, over 90 per cent of the
Moroccan community in Notting Hill in London, which is as large as the
Caribbean community in this part of London, is from Larache, a small town
in Morocco.
Layton-Henry in The Politics of Immigration gives figures on immigration,
derived from a House of Commons Library research paper published in 1976
(see Table 1.2). Adding up the totals in the last column gives estimated net
immigration from the new (or non-white) Commonwealth from 1953 to
mid-1962 of nearly half a million people. The numbers dipped in the late
1950s, when there were fewer jobs, and rose dramatically in the early 1960s
to beat the expected immigration controls (see Chapter 2). After the 1962
Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the numbers settling in Britain from the
Caribbean and South Asia continued to rise, both because workers were at
first admitted in larger numbers than had arrived spontaneously before the
1961–62 bulge, and because family reunion was with difficulty allowed. By
the late 1960s the black and Asian population had doubled to around 1
million. The 1991 Population Census records that the ‘ethnic minority’
population (which it defines as non-Europeans, in other words people who,
while constituting a majority worldwide, are mostly not white) was about 3
million, or 5.5 per cent of the total population.