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

Border Controls 25
some 80,000 Protestant Huguenots from France in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, some of the locals described them as ‘the very offal of
the earth’. Riots against Protestant refugees occurred in London in 1586,
1593, 1595 and 1599. There were anti-black riots in 1919.
The Irish, millions of whom migrated to Britain from the nineteenth
century onwards and now form the largest immigrant group in Britain, were
initially stereotyped as lazy, idolatrous, diseased and criminal, subjects of an
alien Catholic church. They moved into areas, in Liverpool and Glasgow for
example, where living conditions were already wretched and they were
accused of making them worse. They were forced to live in filthy, cramped
cellars and in streets with open sewers and to work in harsh conditions. In
the nineteenth century English and Scots workers reacted with pitched
battles and riots. In the 1950s landlords put up notices saying ‘No paddies,
no wogs, no dogs’. Irish people continue to be subjected to discrimination in
employment, policing and criminal proceedings. The Birmingham Six, from
whom confessions to a pub bombing were extracted in what amounted to
torture, spent years in prison before their convictions were quashed.
Jewish people fared even worse. Panikos Panayi in his book Immigration,
Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, describing the official expulsion of Jews in
1290, comments that ‘popular antisemitism’ manifested itself partly in ‘the
idea that Jews killed Christian children in order to use their blood either as
part of the passover ritual or for medical purposes’, and also in violence:
Violence against Jews occurred with greater regularity and brutality than racial
attacks at any other time in British history. ... The worst pogroms occurred in 1190
in York, resulting in 150 deaths. However, anti-Jewish riots broke out elsewhere at
the same time, including Dunstable, Lynn, Stamford and Bury St Edmunds. In the
last of these fifty-seven Jews died. Between 1262 and 1266 further murders of Jews
occurred in Worcester, Northampton, Canterbury, Lincoln and Ely.
At the end of the nineteenth century, mainly as a result of pogroms in
Romania and Russia, Jews overtook Germans to become the second largest
immigrant group in Britain after the Irish. They then became the main object
of anti-immigrant prejudice and right-wing agitation. The term ‘alien’
became synonymous with Jew, just as the term ‘immigrant’ subsequently
became synonymous with Caribbean or Asian. Some Jews were financiers
or professionals, but most lived in great poverty, in particular in the East End
of London. As many as half worked in the clothing trade, often under
extreme forms of exploitation, for which they were held responsible. They
were vilified, contradictorily, both for their poverty and for their wealth. Jews
were accused of being ‘insanitary’, prone to crime and living in overcrowded
and wretched conditions. According to the Manchester City News of 2 April
1887, Jews were also ‘advanced socialists who sympathise with the Paris
Commune and Chicago martyrs’. On the other hand trade unionists
professed to believe that they could not combine together in unions because
of their individualistic nature, and were inclined to represent all Jews as