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

Border Controls 37
efforts to control the presence of aliens mainly took the form of excluding
those who were considered undesirable after they had entered. King Henry
II banished all ‘aliens’ on the grounds they were ‘becoming too numerous’.
In 1290 all Jews were banished. More foreigners were expelled by Queen
Mary; some were readmitted, and others expelled, by Queen Elizabeth. These
expulsions followed the switches in the rulers’ religious preferences between
Catholicism and Protestantism. In the seventeenth century the power to
deport became the prerogative mainly of the Privy Council rather than of
monarchs. In 1793, in reaction to the French revolution, an Aliens Act was
passed by parliament which sanctioned expulsion, and capital punishment
for expellees who tried to return. It resulted in the deporting of Talleyrand to
the United States but was otherwise not much used, though re-enacted from
time to time in response to fears that anarchy and atheism might be imported
from the continent. In 1848, to counter the perceived menace of revolutionaries
coming to Britain after the Paris Commune, a Removal of Aliens
Act was passed. Palmerston later repealed it on the grounds it might lead to
an abuse of power. Later convicts and trade unionists were transported to
Australasia. These Acts, like the expulsions which preceded them, were an
assertion of the power to deport people who were considered undesirable,
but did not provide for controls on entry.
Erskine May, whose Constitutional History, first published in the late
nineteenth century, is the most widely accepted authority on British constitutional
matters, is quoted by Paul Foot in Immigration and Race in British
Politics as follows:
It has been a proud tradition for England to afford an inviolable asylum to men of
every rank and condition, seeking refuge on her shores, from persecution and danger
in their own lands. ... Through civil wars and revolutions, a disputed succession and
treasonable plots against the State, no foreigners had been disturbed. If guilty of
crimes, they were punished: but otherwise enjoyed the full protection of the law.
In the heyday of liberalism and British industrial supremacy in the
nineteenth century this claim was largely justified. Refugees and revolutionaries
from political struggles in Europe and elsewhere came to Britain,
which was then known as a more liberal country than others in Europe.
They could enter freely, stay in Britain and campaign there without fear of
expulsion. They included Giuseppe Mazzini, Sun Yat Sen and Karl Marx.
Workers too were welcomed, at least by capitalists and politicians. The
British espousal of free trade, a result of its dominant position in world
markets, was, unlike today, accompanied by the free movement of labour. In
particular Irish immigration took place on a large scale to meet the needs of
employers in industry and in agriculture, in spite of a good deal of popular
hostility towards the Irish. As Paul Foot puts it, ‘immigration control, like
protection, was irrelevant, unnecessary – a symbol of national decline’.
But from the 1880s onwards there began to be talk of the possible need
for immigration control. Anti-immigrant sentiment grew in response not