The first survey of British Immigration policy to include both its pre-World War Two origins and its development after the crucial 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. An accessible introduction to a subject of increasing popularity.

Whitehall and the Jews is the most comprehensive study to date of the British response to the plight of European Jewry under Nazism. It contains the definitive account of immigration controls on the admission of refugee Jews, and reveals the doubts and dissent that lay behind British policy. British self-interest consistently limited humanitarian aid to Jews. Refuge was severely restricted during the Holocaust, and little attempt made to save lives, although individual intervention did prompt some admissions on a purely humanitarian basis. After the war, the British government delayed announcing whether refugees would obtain permanent residence, reflecting the government's aim of avoiding long-term responsibility for large numbers of homeless Jews. The balance of state self-interest against humanitarian concern in refugee policy is an abiding theme of Whitehall and the Jews, one of the most important contributions to the understanding of the Holocaust and Britain yet published.

This book analyses the practice of virginity testing endured by South Asian women who wished to enter Britain between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, and places this practice into a wider historical context. Using recently opened government documents the extent to which these women were interrogated and scrutinized at the border is uncovered.

The Development of British Immigration Law (1986) examines the policies and laws of immigration law in the UK. It demonstrates that many modern issues have historical precedents. The justifications for immigration control are examined and linked to a discussion of nationality law and race relations. It is argued that the laws and practices of immigration are unnecessarily rigid and racist, both in design and in effect; that the record of the UK is a sorry chapter in the field of human rights but one which is consistent with international state practice; that immigration is an ideal model to illustrate the UK’s general treatment of civil liberties. Particular aspects of the subject are examined in depth to illustrate the attitudes of government, the courts and civil servants.

Black people in the British Empire have long challenged the notion that "there ain't no black in the Union Jack." For the post-World War II wave of Afro-Caribbean migrants, many of whom had long been subjects of the Empire, claims to a British identity and imperial citizenship were considered to be theirs by birthright. However, while Britain was internationally touted as a paragon of fair play and equal justice, they arrived in a nation that was frequently hostile and unwilling to incorporate Black people into its concept of what it meant to be British. Black Britons therefore confronted the racial politics of British citizenship and became active political agents in challenging anti-Black racism. In a society with a highly racially circumscribed sense of identity-and the laws, customs, and institutions to back it up-Black Britons had to organize and fight to assert their right to belong. In London Is The Place for Me, Kennetta Hammond Perry explores how Afro-Caribbean migrants navigated the politics of race and citizenship in Britain and reconfigured the boundaries of what it meant to be both Black and British at a critical juncture in the history of Empire and twentieth century transnational race politics. She situates their experience within a broader context of Black imperial and diasporic political participation, and examines the pushback-both legal and physical-that the migrants' presence provoked. Bringing together a variety of sources including calypso music, photographs, migrant narratives, and records of grassroots Black political organizations, London Is the Place for Me positions Black Britons as part of wider public debates both at home and abroad about citizenship, the meaning of Britishness and the politics of race in the second half of the twentieth century. The United Kingdom's postwar discriminatory curbs on immigration and explosion of racial violence forced White Britons as well as Black to question their perception of Britain as a racially progressive society and, therefore, to question the very foundation of their own identities. Perry's examination expands our understanding of race and the Black experience in Europe and uncovers the critical role that Black people played in the formation of contemporary British society.

In this contentious and ground-breaking study, the author draws on extensive archival research to provide a new account of the transforamtion of the United Kingdom into a multicultural society through an analysis of the evolution of immigration and citizenship policy since 1945. Against the prevailing academic orthodoxy, he argues that British immigration policy was not racist but both rational and liberal. - ;In this ground-breaking book, the author draws extensively on archival material and theortical advances in the social science literature. Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain examines the transformation since 1945 of the UK from a homogeneous into a multicultural society. Rejecting a dominant strain of sociological and historical inquiry emphasizing state racism, Hansen argues that politicians and civil servants were overall liberal relative to the public, to which they owed their office, and that they pursued policies that were rational for any liberal democratic politician. He explains the trajectory of British migration and nationality policy - its exceptional liberality in the 1950s, its restrictiveness after then, and its tortured and seemingly racist definition of citizenship. The combined effect of a 1948 imperial definition of citizenship (adopted independently of immigration), and a primary commitment to migration from the Old Dominions, locked British politicians into a series of policy choices resulting in a migration and nationality regime that was not racist in intention, but was racist in effect. In the context of a liberal elite and an illiberal public, Britain's current restrictive migration policies result not from the faling of its policy-makers but from those of its institutions. -

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Multiculturalism as a distinct form of liberal-democratic governance gained widespread acceptance after World War II, but in recent years this consensus has been fractured. Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth examines cultural diversity across the postwar Commonwealth, situating modern multiculturalism in its national, international, and historical contexts. Bringing together practitioners from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the legal, political, and philosophical issues involved, these essays address common questions: What is postwar multiculturalism? Why did it come about? How have social actors responded to it? In addition to chapters on Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, this volume also covers India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and Trinidad, tracing the historical roots of contemporary dilemmas back to the intertwined legacies of imperialism and liberalism. In so doing it demonstrates that multiculturalism has implications that stretch far beyond its current formulations in public and academic discourse.