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

28 Open Borders
responsibilities are largely ignored. Hundreds of children of negroid or mixed
parentage eventually find their way to the various homes maintained by the
Corporation, to be reared to unhappy maturity at great public expense. Large numbers
of the adults are in receipt of unemployment benefit or National Assistance and many
are engaged in the drug traffic or supplement their incomes by running illicit drinking
dens or by prostitution.
This, the writers opined, was creating a ‘new Harlem’, and any attempt to
improve conditions would only encourage others to come. Labour’s representative
at a confidential meeting in the Colonial Office in 1954 (reported
by Layton-Henry in The Politics of Immigration) blamed immigrants for ‘overcrowding,
ghettos, crime, disease, dependence on National Assistance and
the creation of racial friction’. The Labour MP for North Kensington, Mr
George Rogers, after the Notting Hill anti-black riots in 1958, made the
following comments to the Daily Sketch on the effect of the ‘tremendous influx
of coloured people from the Commonwealth’:
Overcrowding has fostered vice, drugs, prostitution and the use of knives. For years
the white people have been tolerant. Now their tempers are up.
Racism among the population as a whole was, as before, fuelled by the fact
that the new immigrants were forced to live in poor conditions and to work in
the worst jobs. Expanding industry and services needed workers, and got them
from the British former empire. But it was hard for the new immigrants to find
housing. There was no programme to build council housing to house the new
workers, and in many areas it was initially almost impossible for immigrants
to obtain accommodation on existing council estates, as a result of prejudice
both from council officers and from tenants. Prejudice against ‘coloured’
tenants and neighbours was extreme. As Sam King (see p. 17) put it:
In those days I wouldn’t even try to get a room for myself. There were advertisements
for rooms all over the place but when you went there it had gone. ...
We were the second black family to buy a house in Camberwell. ...
Because we couldn’t get mortgages we pooled all our money to help others.
Immigrants were forced to find accommodation in run-down areas, and were
then, as the Irish had been, blamed for the state of these areas. In addition,
once an immigrant or group of immigrants had obtained a house, this house
was of necessity used to house large numbers of people, which in turn caused
neighbours to complain about squalor and overcrowding.
Commonwealth immigrants came to Britain because there were jobs, and
usually found them immediately. But when unemployment rose black people
were the first to be sacked. Today their children suffer disproportionately
from unemployment. Unemployment for blacks is now two or three times
higher than it is for whites; in some inner-city areas as many as 70 per cent
of young black men are unemployed. With brutal inconsistency, they are
therefore accused both of taking ‘British’ jobs and of scrounging off the state.
Unemployment for blacks is the result of discrimination rather than lower