Immigration

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Demographic movements of people have occurred throughout history, sometimes on a vast scale and over very great distances, but before the development of the nation state only warfare and conquest could exert any control over the phenomenon. From perhaps the 17th century, however, immigration was the process whereby citizens of ‘older’, usually European countries, moved to newly-developing and underpopulated countries, mainly in North America and Australasia. Although immigration controls were occasionally imposed, for most of the period to 1945 relatively free immigration was not only allowed but encouraged by the host countries who needed to increase their populations rapidly in order to develop their economies and exploit their territory. In the USA the waves of immigration have been of great importance socially and politically. As early as the 1920s politicians were attacking the tendency for everyone to be a ‘hyphenated-American’; they were referring to the way US citizens described themselves as, for example, Italo-American, German-American or Irish-American. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 20th century less than half the US population was second generation American. Similar examples can be found elsewhere: for example, only Athens itself has a larger urban Greek population than Melbourne in Australia.

The golden days of immigrants being welcomed ended sometime during the 1950s, as population and labour levels reached and exceeded optimum levels. It was then that a different type of immigration came to prominence. It was no longer the movement of, often highly skilled, populations from old European societies. Immigration became, instead, the movement of largely unskilled and uneducated peasants from the Third World, especially from ex-colonies to the former colonialist European countries, and to a much lesser extent to the North American/Australasian world. The latter, having achieved their population goals, closed immigration down to a trickle. The former colonial powers, above all France and the United Kingdom, started the post-war period with a perceived obligation to the populations of their former possessions. They also hoped to replace the colonial bonds with some more tenuous relationship, through the British Commonwealth and the informal gatherings of the Francophone countries, which would help retain their world power status, and thus extending citizenship to their former colonial subjects seemed politically rational.

At the same time there was a need for cheap labour in the immediately post-war economies. This was felt elsewhere, West Germany being the best example. But in these non-colonial countries immigration tended to mean a short-term importation of labour from poorer countries, Italy and Turkey in Germany’s case, which did not involve any right of permanent residence.

Before long the presence of alien cultures, languages and religions began to irritate the British, and the slowing of economic growth also meant that the need to import cheap labour declined. By the early 1960s race riots began to break out, the government started to introduce severe restrictions on immigration, which itself became an emotive political issue. It took somewhat longer in France, but by the end of the 1970s France too had begun to find its ex-colonial citizens politically embarrassing. By the early 1990s immigration had, indeed, become more politically explosive in France, and also in Germany, than it ever had been in the UK, where a consensus among the major parties managed to strangle the more overtly racist anti-immigration political movements (see neo-fascism).

The USA, for all its fears and though it has restricted immigration, continues to be much more generous to peoples it sees as oppressed, and large numbers of Asians and Hispanics have been allowed to settle, and have become vital members of US society, in the last 20 years. Western Europe, on the other hand, has meanwhile placed severe constraints on immigration. In the 1990s the problem was re-emerging in a novel guise, with significant demands for immigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union of people seeking the riches and opportunities of developed capitalist societies. So seriously is this taken as a threat that discussions have even been held as to the possibility of using NATO-dedicated troops for the purpose of policing immigration. One problem emerging at the end of the 20th century was to distinguish would-be immigrants, especially those referred to as ‘economic immigrants’, from asylum seekers fleeing persecution. Because most Western nations have obligations under international law to accept asylum seekers, some individuals wishing to evade their increasingly strict immigration controls seek to pass themselves off as refugees from persecution. The relative numbers of these ‘genuine’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and the process for dealing with their applications to remain in the country have developed into major political issues in a number of Western European countries.