İngiltere’de Göçün Değişen Yüzü [The Changing Face of Migration in England]

A brief history of UK migration

The contemporary phase of the UK’s immigration history began symbolically with the arrival from Jamaica of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. The 492 passengers on board of the famed ship that gave its name to the ‘Windrush generation’ of postcolonial immigration from the British ‘New Commonwealth’ arrived in the UK as British subjects with full rights of entry and settlement. The British Nationality Act of 1948, passed in the same year, guaranteed that such equal citizenship rights could potentially be enjoyed by all Commonwealth citizens –¬ effectively by one-third of the world’s total population ¬– in the following fifteen years.

Although despite free movement rights Commonwealth immigration to the UK remained low in the first few ensuing years, with no more than 2,000 yearly arrivals and still significantly larger out-migration of UK citizens to the colonial periphery, a sudden spike in immigration following 1954 resulted in intensifying racially charged social tensions. By 1961 – when arrivals from the Commonwealth rose above 135,000 – the UK government was intensely debating measures to curb immigration, which materialised in the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, the cornerstone of Britain’s restrictive immigration policy. For the first time, the entry and settlement rights of Commonwealth citizens became tied to holding employment vouchers, and then further limited to temporary work permits following the Immigration Act of 1971.

This early immigration history, tied as it was to the history of decolonisation and ‘race relations’, has marked out the distinctiveness of the British migration system compared to ‘guest-worker’ systems such as Germany’s, and established the dominant demographic characteristics of the UK’s migrant population for decades to come. The 1971 Census recorded just over 3 million non-UK born persons living in Great Britain (just under 6% of Britain’s population at the time), the largest individual countries of birth being the Irish Republic (693,000), India (313,000), Pakistan (137,000 – which then also included ‘East Pakistan’, today’s Bangladesh) and the USA (110,000). European countries of birth accounted for under 810,000, Caribbean countries for 237,000, Africa for 210,000 and the ‘Old Commonwealth’ comprising Canada, Australia and New Zealand for around 136,000. A decade later, in 1981, the overall number of non-UK born population stood at 3.4 million, with only those born in Ireland seeing a decrease in numbers (of almost 90,000) among the major countries of birth. These patterns and trends were to remain distinctly noticeable even at the turn of the 21st century, after the final unravelling of the British empire and three decades of EU membership.

A restructuring system: the millennial migration complex

Figure 1: The top five countries of birth of non-UK born population in the United Kingdom (2000–2018).
Source: Own elaboration based on data from the Annual Population Survey (Office for National Statistics 2019).
Notes: The chart traces back the five largest countries of birth in 2018. It also highlights the other top-five countries in the years when some of those in 2018 were not in the top five. For the end years (2000 and 2018) it spells out the the top-ten countries.

Today’s migration landscape is significantly, although not unrecognisably, different to the one painted from the palette of the Windrush generation. It covers a much larger canvas of 9.3 million foreign-born and 6.1 million foreign-citizen residents, making up 14% and 6% of the total population respectively. At the end of 2018 the top five foreign citizenships held were Polish, Romanian, Indian, Irish and Italian. The five largest non-UK countries of birth: Poland, India, Pakistan, Romania and Ireland. It is particularly the recent diversification of countries of birth which shows the strongest sign of a restructuring migration system. As charted in Figure 1, by tracing back the development of the five largest birth-country groups over two decades we can spot three major turning points. In 2014–2015 for the first time an EU member state – Poland – became the largest non-UK country of birth, overtaking the number of Indian-born despite the latter’s also increasing number. Seven years earlier, in 2007–2008, Poland had jumped to the second place, having overtaken in the course of only three years all other major established foreign-born nationality group: Bangladesh, Germany, Pakistan and Ireland. The decline of Ireland as the major country of birth had been a slow process whose signs date back, as we have seen, to at least the 1970s, but which reached completion in 2003–2004 when it fell into second place after India for the first time. Three years earlier, in 2000–2001, the country’s landscape of foreign-born residents was still very similar to that of three decades before.

The main driver of this structural change is, of course, the development of intra-EU mobility patterns following the EU’s post-2004 eastern enlargements and the 2008–2009 European debt crisis. Poland is a representative of the eight Central-Eastern-European states that joined the EU and gained full rights on the British labour market in 2004 (EU8), while Romania became a formal member in 2007 together with Bulgaria (EU2), with the British labour market opening up to them in 2014. Ireland and Italy, on the other hand, have been dramatically affected by the debt crisis, plunging the latter in the top-ten list of foreign countries of birth, and halting the historic decline of the Irish-born community until very recently.

As Figure 2 shows, at the aggregate level the non-EU foreign-born population still significantly outnumbers the EU-born (right panel), while at the same time highlighting a somewhat earlier transition in the migration system in respect to foreign countries of citizenship (left panel): it was in 2012–2013 that the UK’s millennial migration complex shifted visibly and dramatically to a European one. At the same time, the latest data points depicted in the two Figures also signal that this newly emerged system might be on the edge of further change.

Figure 2: Non-UK-born and non-UK-citizen residents in the United Kingdom, by EU/non-EU status (2004–2018).
Source: Own elaboration based on data from the Annual Population Survey (Office for National Statistics 2019).

Towards a post-Brexit migration system

The 2016 referendum on EU membership has forcefully upset not only the UK’s political establishment but also its migration trends. In respect to the latter, according to some, the UK was “already in a post-Brexit era” in years before the country’s official exist date in 2020. If so, the new era will be characterised by an overall negative net migration trend from the EU27 (Figure 2), particularly the most established countries of origin such as Poland (Figure 1). The change will likely be a combination of demographic and legal processes, combining low immigration flows, increasing return movements and accelerating naturalisation rates. There is evidence that an openness to naturalising as British citizens has been a distinguishing feature among ‘new’ post-2004 EU migrants compared to those from the ‘old’ member states even before the EU referendum, yet one of the effect of the Brexit so far has been to drive up such legal integration overall. At the same time, the fact that in 2018 the number of UK residents who were born in Europe has also decreased (Figure 2, right panel) is clear sign that many are leaving the country.

Those who decide to stay and be part of the UK’s post-Brexit journey will see their transition from being EU citizens with full rights of entry, settlement and economic membership in the UK to becoming either British citizens or ‘settled’ permanent residents. At the same time, the UK government is working on a new ‘skills-based immigration system’ to replace free movement rights with permits to fill specific labour-market shortages. These latest and ongoing developments, however, bring about a sense of déjà vu, reviving the spirit of the 1971 Immigration Act and the debates which preceded it. For the UK as a whole, the task will be to avoid replaying the painful economic stagnation of the 1970s. For the UK’s European-born residents, the aim will be to avoid the fate of the Windrush generation, many of whom had similarly arrived as free-moving citizens of a post-national equal membership organisation only to see their citizenship rights questioned seventy years later.