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

20 Open Borders
In all the fuss about migration into Britain and Europe, it is often forgotten
that migration in the other direction is larger. Since the beginnings of
European imperialist expansion in the sixteenth century, almost twice as
many Europeans have migrated to the Americas, Africa and Asia as people
from these areas have migrated to Europe. According to a recent letter to the
Guardian by Marika Sherwood of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, a
total of some 21 million people left Britain to settle elsewhere in the period
1815–1912, most of them economic migrants rather than refugees. In the
process, ‘the Tasmanian aborigines and most of the indigenous peoples of
the Caribbean were extinguished; the population of Australian aborigines
was reduced by some 80 per cent; that of the Americas, North and South,
was reduced by between 33 and 80 per cent’. Net emigration from Britain
continued for most of the period after the Second World War; official British
figures for net migration reported by Zig Layton-Henry in The Politics of
Immigration are as in Table 1.3.
Table 1.3 Net migration to/from Britain, 1871–1991
1871–80 – 257,000
1881–90 – 817,000
1891–1900 – 122,000
1901–10 – 756,000
1911–20 – 857,000
1921–30 – 565,000
1931–40 + 650,000
1951–61 + 12,000
1961–71 – 320,000
1971–81 – 699,000
1981–91 – 6,000
Source: Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration
The net immigration to Britain in the 1930s is mainly the result of British
migrants returning to Britain having failed to prosper abroad during the
depression. Unlike other more economically successful European countries,
Britain did not have a substantial net addition to its population after the
Second World War. As Robin Cohen comments in his book Frontiers of
Identity: The British and the Others:
The xenophobic right is prone to describe the British Isles as under siege from a horde
of restless foreigners about to invade their historically undisturbed homeland. This is
a curious myopia as it takes little account of the many early invasions of Britain by the
Vikings, the Normans, the Romans and others, or the fact that the British themselves
have been highly energetic colonisers of other people’s lands. Many of the population
invasions of the last 250 years started, not ended, in Britain.