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

Border Controls 55
the guestworker system in other European countries. The act thus increased
the number of people entitled to enter Britain without restriction, but they
were nearly all white. Moreover on the day the act became law, on 1 January
1973, Britain joined the European Economic Community. This meant that
an additional 200 million people were to have the right freely to enter and
to settle in Britain. Although concern was expressed in some quarters that
this might lead to an overwhelming invasion of Spanish and Portuguese
waiters (which of course did not occur), there was virtually no populist or
racist opposition to this innovation.
From 1971 onwards the Ugandan government under Idi Amin put
pressure on people of Asian descent to leave Uganda, and in 1972 it expelled
most of them. Under the Labour government’s 1968 Act the Conservative
government of Edward Heath could have kept them all, or virtually all, out
of Britain. It decided instead to persuade other governments to take as many
as possible and to allow the rest to enter Britain. 23,000 Ugandan Asians,
mostly the best qualified, went to Canada and other countries. 29,000 came
to Britain, where the government made a mainly unsuccessful attempt to
disperse them away from existing areas of Asian settlement. As a result of
this and of continuing family reunion, the Asian population in Britain
continued to grow. Immigration of Indians from East Africa and from India
increased to a peak of 40,000 in 1972 and continued at around 20,000 a
year for the rest of the 1970s; immigration from Pakistan was about 10,000
a year in the 1970s. Immigration from the Caribbean, on the other hand,
declined from about 5,000 a year in the 1960s to almost nothing by the
1970s. By the 1990s there was net emigration by Caribbeans.
In government in the 1970s Labour introduced no new controls, and it
appeared to have some second thoughts on their effects. There was some
recognition that the rushed introduction of the 1968 Commonwealth
Immigrants Act had set back Labour’s attempts to improve race relations,
and that its unexpected defeat in the 1970 general election might have had
something to do with its failure to counter Enoch Powell. In 1972 a subcommittee
of the party’s national executive committee produced a green
paper which recognised that increasing the severity of immigration controls
only led to demands for more of them, or even for complete bans on
immigration. In opposition in the 1980s, the Labour Party, influenced by
anti-deportation campaigns and believing there would be few immigrants
when unemployment was so high, undertook to repeal the various
immigration acts.
The Tories’ election victory in 1979, on the other hand, followed the
espousal by Margaret Thatcher of some of the rhetoric of the neo-fascist
National Front, as well as other right-wing and anti-union rhetoric. On 30
January 1978, Mrs Thatcher was interviewed on ITV’s World in Action. She
expressed sympathy with people who felt immigration was too high and who
were ‘really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by
people with a different culture’. ‘If you want good race relations,’ she said,