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The modern period is the most extensively documented and politically contested phase of migration in British history. It begins with Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, proceeds through the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948 and the mass Commonwealth migration of the 1950s and 1960s, encompasses a tightening legislative framework from the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 through the Immigration Act 1971 to the Immigration Act 2014, and extends to post-2004 migration from the expanded European Union and recent refugee flows from Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. It is also the period in which Parliament legislated against racial discrimination — the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 — while simultaneously enacting progressively restrictive immigration controls. This lesson traces that double movement.
Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor on 30 January 1933 triggered an immediate wave of Jewish emigration. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship; the Anschluss of March 1938 extended the same conditions to Austrian Jews overnight; and the coordinated violence of Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938 destroyed roughly 7,500 Jewish businesses and 267 synagogues, making clear that departure was the only remaining option.
Between 1933 and 1939 approximately 70,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia reached Britain, including about 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children brought in through the Kindertransport between December 1938 and September 1939. Children travelled by train across the Netherlands and by boat to Harwich, where they were received at Dovercourt before foster placement; many of their parents later perished in the Holocaust. Adult refugees included figures who transformed British intellectual life, including Ernst Gombrich, Nikolaus Pevsner, and future Nobel laureates Max Perutz and Hans Krebs. Entry was conditional on a guarantor or approved employment category, notably domestic service, which admitted around 20,000 Jewish women.
Irish migration continued through the interwar period, shaped by the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Under the Ireland Act 1949 (and the later Common Travel Area), Irish citizens retained an unrestricted right to enter, reside and work in the UK. Irish workers staffed London Transport, interwar suburban construction and wartime munitions factories. Roughly 250,000 Polish servicemen and women fought under British command after 1939, including the pilots of 303 (Polish) Squadron in the Battle of Britain. Faced with the Soviet takeover of Poland, the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 — Britain's first statutory provision for a settled migrant community — authorised them and their dependants to remain. A Polish-speaking community of approximately 160,000 had settled by 1951, concentrated in London, the West Midlands, Manchester and Scotland.
The post-war British economy faced acute labour shortages. Rebuilding housing, transport and industry left major sectors — especially London Transport, British Railways and the new National Health Service — unable to recruit sufficient workers at home. Government ministries recruited in the Caribbean, where unemployment was high and most territories were still Crown colonies with English as the official language and British-modelled schools.
The SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948, carrying 1,027 passengers of whom approximately 492 were Caribbean migrants, most of them Jamaican. Many were ex-servicemen who had fought in the RAF or merchant navy during the war. The word Windrush came to stand for the whole post-war Caribbean migration to Britain.
The legislative framework had shifted only six months earlier. The British Nationality Act 1948, in force from 1 January 1949, created a single status of Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC), confirming that Commonwealth citizens had an unrestricted right to enter, live and work in Britain. This was the legal basis for the migration that followed.
Between 1948 and 1962 approximately 125,000 Caribbean migrants arrived, roughly half Jamaican, with sizeable groups from Barbados, Trinidad and Guyana. They were actively invited by British public bodies. London Transport opened recruitment offices in Barbados in 1956, with a loan scheme covering passage; by 1961 around 5,000 of its staff were Caribbean migrants. The NHS recruited Caribbean nurses through direct advertising, and by 1977 Caribbean-born staff made up approximately 12% of NHS nurses. British Rail and private foundry, hospitality and textile employers ran similar schemes. Settlement concentrated in London (Brixton, Notting Hill, Hackney), Birmingham (Handsworth), Manchester (Moss Side), Leeds (Chapeltown), Bristol (St Paul's) and Wolverhampton. The Notting Hill experience is the subject of Lessons 8 and 9.
From the later 1950s, migration from the Indian subcontinent accelerated, with chain migration linking specific districts to specific British industries: Gujaratis and Punjabis to the textile mills of Yorkshire (Bradford, Leeds) and Lancashire; Sikhs to the foundries and heavy industry of the West Midlands (Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry); Mirpuris (displaced by the Mangla Dam project from 1960) particularly to Bradford; Bengalis to the East London docks and later catering. By 1971 there were approximately 313,000 Indian-born and 140,000 Pakistani-born people in the UK.
Commonwealth citizenship did not translate into equality of reception. Signs advertising lodgings frequently specified "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" — a formulation documented across Notting Hill, Brixton and Manchester through the 1950s and early 1960s. The phrase is quoted here as evidence of the racism of the period, not to normalise it: such signs both expressed prejudice and materially excluded migrants from the private rental market. Informal colour bars operated in pubs, dance halls, workplaces and churches. The 1958 Notting Hill riots and the 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane (covered in Lessons 8 and 9) were the most visible results. Housing discrimination drove Caribbean and South Asian migrants into the exploitative rental market of landlords such as Peter Rachman, producing the overcrowded multi-occupied houses that characterised Notting Hill and Brixton through the 1960s.
The political response to rising visible migration was a progressively restrictive immigration framework, even as anti-discrimination law developed in parallel.
| Year | Act | Key provision |
|---|---|---|
| 1905 | Aliens Act | First general immigration control |
| 1948 | British Nationality Act | CUKC citizenship for all Commonwealth subjects |
| 1962 | Commonwealth Immigrants Act | First restriction on Commonwealth entry; voucher system |
| 1968 | Commonwealth Immigrants Act | Restricted entry of East African Asians holding UK passports |
| 1971 | Immigration Act | "Patriality"; end of primary Commonwealth immigration |
| 1981 | British Nationality Act | Redefined citizenship; ended automatic birthright citizenship |
| 1988 | Immigration Act | Removed statutory rights for certain Commonwealth citizens |
| 2014 | Immigration Act | "Hostile environment" duties on landlords, banks, employers, NHS |
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was the first direct restriction on Commonwealth migration, requiring employment vouchers (Category A for a job offer, B for recognised skills, C unskilled, with C effectively closed by 1964). The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, passed under Harold Wilson in a single week in February, targeted East African Asians whose UK passports had begun to bring them to Britain as Kenya's Africanisation policies pressed them out. It introduced a patriality test — UK passports no longer carried automatic right of entry unless the holder had a UK-born parent or grandparent — and the European Commission of Human Rights later held it had been racially discriminatory. The Immigration Act 1971, in force from 1 January 1973, consolidated these changes into the binary of patrials (right of abode) and non-patrials. For practical purposes, 1 January 1973 marks the end of primary Commonwealth migration to Britain.
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