Strangers, Aliens and Asians

Anne Kershen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135770013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Exploring the dynamics that drive the processes of immigrant settlement and assimilation, this fascinating book looks at whether these are solely the outcome of the temporal setting, cultural background, and the contemporaneous socio-economic and political conditions, or whether there are factors which, irrespective of the prevailing environment, are constant features in the symbiosis between the outsider and the insider.

Focusing on the area of Spitalfields in East London, this volume compares and contrasts the settlement, integration and assimilation processes undergone by three different immigrant groups over a period of almost three hundred and fifty years, and assesses their relative successes and failures. The three groups examined are the Huguenots who arrived from France in the 1670s, the Eastern European Jews coming from the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century, and the Bangladeshis who began settling in Spitalfields in the early 1960s.

For centuries Spitalfields in East London has been a first point of settlement for new immigrants to Britain, and its proximity to both the affluence of the City of London and the poverty of what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets means that it has been, and still is, an area 'on the edge'. Concentrating on this district, this book examines at grass roots level the migrant experience and the processes by which the outsider may become the insider.

1 People, place and a phenomenon

This is a book about people, place and a phenomenon. The people in chronological order of their arrival in England are Huguenots, the strangers; Eastern European Jews, the aliens; and Bangladeshis, the Asians. The place is Spitalfields, an area of 250 acres, lying in the western part of the East End and bordering the eastern edge of the City of London. The phenomenon is migration, in this context the movement of people from one country to another with the intention of settling in the host country for a significant period or permanently. The subjects of this book were all migrants, essentially people who moved from their country of birth to London. There much of the similarity would appear to end. The migrant groups came in different centuries, were of different religions and, at first sight, appear to fall into different categories: those of refugees, immigrants and sojourners. However, the realities of life can never be painted in black and white; there is always shading. It is thus with the Huguenots, Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis. They would appear to fit comfortably into specific and separate temporal, typological and theoretical compartments, but do they really? Before examining the empirical data enabling us to respond to this question, we need to explore some of the methodologies employed in the study of migrations and migrants.

People

Typologies

Migrants, as opposed to travellers or holidaymakers, are individuals or groups who, for whatever reasons, move from one place to another for a period of at least a year. Whilst the noun ‘migrant’ can be used in a variety of spatial contexts, it is usually assumed that those it is describing have covered some distance, either within one country or between one or more nations. International migration is acknowledged as a permanent or semipermanent crossing of national boundaries.¹ However, one of the earliest migration theorists, the late nineteenth-century geographer Ernest George Ravenstein, initially focused his attention on the internal movements of people in Britain, only subsequently enlarging his studies to assume an international perspective.² This book's protagonists were all transnational migrants who immigrated with the intention of remaining for a period of years, if not permanently. Having now established their migrant status, the next step is to establish under which typological headings the Huguenots, Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis appear.

The primary category of migration is that which separates those who emigrate willingly from those who are forced to leave. However, it is not always possible to recognise the dichotomy. The catalytic issues are rarely clear-cut and it is imperative to incorporate this factor into any analysis. As the Lucassen brothers recorded at the end of the 1990s, ‘The rapid reduction of . . . typologies to fixed dichotomies often causes the dividing and isolating capacity of an analytical framework to overshadow its clarifying and explanatory potential.’³ Thus, we have to be cautious how we define and where we locate the Huguenots, Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis within the framework of migration.

Migrants can be listed under three main typological classifications: voluntary, involuntary and those on the borderline, the grey area between the positives. The category ‘voluntary’ accommodates the broadest band of migrants. It includes all those who have made the decision to leave home of their own free will in search of a more favourable, if not perfect, economic, meteorological, political, religious or sexual environment – or a combination of some, if not all. It is regularly accepted that the majority of free migrants are, or were, what the late twentieth century denominated ‘economic’ migrants – people who leave home for elsewhere with the specific intention of enhancing their economic prospects. Both skilled and unskilled emigrants fall into this broad-based voluntary category, one which has a number of sub-sectors accommodating, amongst others, professionals, artisans, white-collar workers and blue-collar or manual workers. Once the emigrant becomes an immigrant, the receiving societies’ preferences and sub-classifications tend to be imposed. Though the skilled are most frequently perceived as ‘good’ migrants, this form of acceptance is subject to prevailing political and socio-economic biases. In the 1930s, German refugee doctors found it almost impossible to gain entry to Britain in their professional capacity, the BMA arguing that their admission would endanger British jobs.⁴ One of the few means of access for Jewish men and women seeking to leave Nazi Germany was through employment as domestic servants and gardeners, sectors where there was a paucity of home labour. More recently, Alison Bloch has shown that, in the late 1990s, ‘Many refugees arrive in Britain with high levels of education and qualifications. Nevertheless, they seem unable to use their skills in paid employment’.⁵ At the same time, unskilled immigrants, usually plugging gaps in the labour market, are perceived as wage-undercutters, job-stealers or social-benefit fraudsters. In spite of the benefits some may provide, they are labelled ‘bad’ migrants and parasites on a national economy.

The first peacetime Aliens Act to be passed in Britain appeared on the Statute Book at the end of 1905. It sought to prohibit the entry of pauper aliens and was a direct response to the significant increase of Eastern European alien immigrants in London and the main provincial cities.⁶ The introduction of immigration control introduced a new type of migrant to the United Kingdom: the illegal, as opposed to the legal, immigrant. Yet, even though the status of illegal has existed for almost a century, it is only in the past few decades, with the introduction of increasingly restrictive immigration legislation, that the noun ‘illegal’ has become common parlance and, standing alone can be used to describe an undesirable and unwanted entrant to Britain. In peacetime, the determining of who is a ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ immigrant is dependent on the response of governments to the economic or social threat posed by outsiders. Tensions over the consequences of a widening pool of immigrant labour at times of financial uncertainty and growing unemployment encourages the closing of borders and an increasing selectivity in the admittance of aliens. At the time of writing, existing legislation⁷ makes it almost impossible for an ‘economic’ migrant to gain entry into Britain without guaranteed employment or considerable personal financial resources. So obsessed are governments and the public with the threat and presence of ‘illegals’⁸ that even the word immigrant is taken as a pejorative. It is now rarely used to describe the pioneering individual who seeks to contribute to the receiving society and improve the quality of life for self and family, thus building a future which offers hope and security. Instead the immigrant has become the scrounger, a being that imperils native jobs, homes and the traditional British way of life.

The Huguenots immigrated to England at a time when there were no entry controls. In modern parlance, the French Calvinists would have been legals. Eastern European Jews were arriving both before and after the Aliens Act of 1905 came into operation.⁹ Once immigration controls were in place, those unable to demonstrate an ability to earn a living and who did not have £5 for themselves and £2 for each dependent, as a means of maintenance prior to taking up employment, were denied entry. Even before the Act was in operation, access was denied to any would-be immigrant with a criminal record, anyone showing evidence of insanity, or those suffering from a contagious disease. Doubtless some slipped through the net at the specified ports of entry, but it would be impossible to quantify them. Even though Bengali migrants have been arriving in Britain since the eighteenth century, large-scale immigration has only taken place since the 1950s. In the half century following, immigrant entry to Britain has been increasingly policed and contained. Almost certainly there are illegal Bangladeshi immigrants now working in the curry restaurants and leather workshops of Spitalfields. However, as in the case of their Eastern European alien predecessors, it would be impossible to provide details of their age, gender or exact location.

The antithesis of voluntary is, of course, involuntary, a tragic heading under which too many migrants are listed. Involuntary migration incorporates the victims of colonial expansion and slavery, of forced labour into the gulags of the Soviet Union and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany as well as refugees from ethnic cleansing, religious persecution and natural disasters. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the noun refugee, an anglicised version of the word réfugié, first appeared in the English language in 1685, and was used to refer to Huguenots who had escaped from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.¹⁰ In contrast with those forcibly expelled from their countries of residence, for example Huguenot clergy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Asian Ugandans two centuries later, lay Calvinists were not ejected from France but, in the years leading up to, and following, the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were forbidden to leave. Those escaping to England and other Protestant countries risked all because they refused to subjugate religious beliefs to national loyalty.

It is the grey area between voluntary and involuntary migrants which requires particular analysis. The researches of Jan Lucassen, Diana Kay and Robert Miles have revealed that what may, in the past, have been perceived as free movement was in fact coerced. Lucassen provides the example of one group of seasonal migrants who decided to risk their health, and sometimes their lives, because they needed the proceeds of work to pay their debts to landowners who had provided them with food in the winter in return for their labour during harvest time.¹¹ European Voluntary Workers, who were recruited from refugee camps in Europe, were moved around and treated as ‘virtual slaves’,¹² whilst indentured labourers freely signed up for work, though some, for example, Chinese workers in the early twentieth century, were misled as to what exactly they were signing up for.¹³ Robin Cohen has shown that ‘most indentured labourers were recruited from India’,¹⁴ their treatment closely resembling that of the African slaves they were replacing. Indentureds, those who were bound by contract to their masters, enjoyed virtually no freedom of movement, were subjected to physical and financial punishment and rarely ended up with more than the cost of their fare home.¹⁵ They had, however, made a free decision to sign up and consequently, however enslaved, could not be bought or sold. They inhabit a middle place on the free/unfree chart. And how free a decision is that of the twenty-first-century relocated worker who, if he or she does not move with the company, might well be forced into unemployment and financial hardship? The decision to move in the case of commercial and professional relocation might be one rationally taken, but how free is it? In contrast, writing about nineteenth-century Russian Jewry, John Klier¹⁶ has proved that it is a misconstruction to believe that, in order to escape the pogroms, Eastern European Jews left their homes as refugees or unwilling migrants. Research has shown that the majority had made a rational choice to seek economic mobility in the west. The Huguenots cover the spectrum from voluntary through to involuntary. Some, as will be shown below, were genuine economic migrants; others were clergy forced to leave, even if free to determine their destination; but the majority comprised those who would have preferred not to leave France but did so rather than succumb to the will of the Catholic monarch and clerics. It is generally assumed that the Bengali immigrants came for economic reasons and were voluntary emigrants. There was, however, a minority of anti-government activists who would have preferred to stay but had to leave for reasons of personal safety.

Up until this point, I have considered the movement of migrants under the categories of free, unfree or in that middle place. I have also surveyed the kaleidoscope of skills and reasons for departure of those who migrate. In his book, Global Diasporas,¹⁷ Robin Cohen takes the notion of diaspora as the basis for his typological discourse. Eschewing an individualist approach, he lists migrants as diasporic groups, locating them under the following headings: victim, labour, trade, imperial and culture.¹⁸ Using this methodology, the Huguenots and Jews would appear predominantly in the victim (religious) column, though a small number of each could be considered under trade, or even labour, while the Bengalis would be cross-indexed under labour and imperial with a minority under victim and possibly trade.

There is one typology which can only be applied after several decades, or even generations, of immigrant settlement have passed. It has been used by Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach and classifies according to totality of migrant assimilation. As their exemplar, Portes and Bach put f...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Strangers, Aliens and Asians
• British politics and society
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. People, place and a phenomenon
• 2. Home
• 3. Spitalfields: a place on the edge
• 4. Religion
• 5. Charity and welfare
• 6. Mother tongue as a bridge to assimilation?
• 7. Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis and the spirit of capitalism
• 8. Xenophobia, anti-alienism and racism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index