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

42 Open Borders
refugees from Germany. From 1933 to 1938 only 11,000 Jewish refugees
from Germany were admitted to Britain; after the intensification of their
persecution 55,000 entered in the next two years. 20,000 of them entered
as domestic servants, a fact which casts doubt on any subsequent claims of
generosity. The first question asked by an immigration officer, according to
the Labour MP Josiah Wedgewood, was ‘Are you a Jew?’, making a mockery
of the provision for political asylum in the Aliens Restriction Act. Thus,
shockingly, were Jews driven back to the concentration camps.
During the Second World War, the pressures to intern aliens were at first
muted by the obvious circumstances of their presence in Britain as refugees
from the fascist governments against whom the war was being fought. Yet
in July 1941 the government decided to intern all ‘enemy’ aliens, including
thousands of Jews as well as German trade unionists and socialists who had
opposed Hitler. Several thousand aliens, almost all of them Jews, were
shipped to Australia and Canada, and on at least one ship were badly
mistreated by the sailors transporting them. Most of the internees in Britain
were released by the middle of 1942, after many complaints about their
treatment in camps.
After the war, the new Labour government, which had been elected on a
promise of full employment, was inclined towards a policy of strict
enforcement of the Aliens Act. It quickly became clear that the problem was
not unemployment, but labour shortages. The government was rebuked by
some Tory MPs for their failure to realise this. For example in 1946 the Tory
MP Peter Thorneycroft stated:
The fact is that with a shortage of manpower in this country every kind of administrative
and bureaucratic difficulty is put in the way of the volunteer who tries to get
into this country to work. I find something a little contemptible about a party which
preaches internationalism abroad and yet takes every step to prevent free men from
coming here to work.
The government’s restrictive policy was also opposed by James Callaghan, a
former union official and now MP, subsequently Labour Prime Minister, who
predicted in 1946:
In a few years we will be faced with a shortage of labour – not with a shortage of jobs.
We ought now to become a country where immigrants are welcomed. We should
break away from this artificial segregation of nation from nation. ... Who is going to
pay for the old age pensions and social services unless we have an addition to our
population, which only immigration can provide in the years to come?
The government was eventually forced to agree. Poles, displaced persons and
European Voluntary Workers (see Chapter 1) were brought in outside the
Aliens Restriction Act.
The yearly renewal of the Aliens Order was opposed by a few Labour MPs
and in the early 1960s by the Tory opposition spokesperson on Home Affairs,