Around 16% of people living in Britain were born abroad. Immigration has transformed the country since the Second World War, and it has been at or near the top of British political argument for most of that time.
Empire first
The crucial context is that British immigration is largely a consequence of empire. The 1948 British Nationality Act gave citizens of the UK and colonies the right to live and work in Britain — around 800 million people at the time — and post-war Britain, short of labour, actively recruited from them.
Windrush
The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 carrying around 500 passengers from the Caribbean. They were British citizens travelling within their own country, invited to fill shortages in transport, construction and the new NHS.
They met a great deal of open hostility — boarding houses advertising “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” — and built communities anyway, in Brixton, Notting Hill, Handsworth and Moss Side. The Windrush generation is now commemorated annually on 22 June.
The Windrush scandal of 2018 revealed that many of them, and their children, had been wrongly classified as illegal immigrants under “hostile environment” policies — losing jobs, homes, healthcare, and in some cases being detained or deported despite a lifetime of legal residence. It forced the resignation of the Home Secretary and remains a serious national disgrace.
The waves
- Irish — the longest-standing and largest historical migration, particularly after the Famine.
- Jewish refugees from Russia in the 1880s-1900s, and from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
- Caribbean, from 1948.
- South Asian — India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh, from the 1950s, and Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972.
- Eastern European — a very large movement, particularly Polish, after EU enlargement in 2004.
- Hong Kong — a British National (Overseas) visa route opened in 2021, taking well over 100,000 people.
The politics
Immigration has been a defining and frequently ugly issue. Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, the National Front in the 1970s, and the immigration argument at the heart of the Brexit referendum all belong to a single long thread.
Since Brexit, free movement with the EU has ended and been replaced by a points-based system applying equally to all nationalities. Net migration nonetheless reached record levels afterwards, driven by work visas for health and care, international students, and humanitarian routes for Ukraine and Hong Kong — a result almost nobody on either side of the referendum predicted.
What it produced
Modern Britain is unrecognisable from the country of 1945, and most obviously so in its cities. London speaks over 300 languages and has a population around 40% of whom were born abroad. The national dish is arguably chicken tikka masala, the NHS could not function without migrant staff, and British music, food, comedy and sport have been comprehensively reshaped.
British attitudes are also more complicated than the political temperature suggests. Polling consistently finds most people positive about immigration’s cultural and economic effects while simultaneously believing the system is poorly managed — and both views are held by the same people.