Modern Britain: Wars, Empire's End and the Law, c1900–present
A New Century, A New Politics of Migration
Between c1900 and the present, migration to Britain was reshaped by world wars, the end of the Empire, and a new framework of immigration law. The 1905 Aliens Act had already established that the state could refuse entry; the 20th century saw that principle extended to almost every group in turn. At the same time, two world wars brought European refugees and colonial troops; decolonisation drew Caribbean and South Asian migrants from the wider Commonwealth; and EU enlargement in 2004 delivered the largest single peacetime arrival in British history. Push and pull factors remained the same shape, but the politics around them changed completely.
Four major migrant streams shaped modern Britain: World War refugees (Belgians 1914, European Jews 1933–39, Poles after 1945); Commonwealth migrants from the Caribbean (Windrush 1948), South Asia and East Africa (Ugandan Asians 1972); EU migrants after 2004 (around one million Poles by 2017); and asylum seekers throughout. Each was shaped by a specific piece of legislation.
Wars and Refugees
The two world wars produced the largest refugee movements of the century. In autumn 1914, around 250,000 Belgian refugees fled the German invasion and arrived in Britain — the largest single refugee influx Britain had then experienced. They were initially welcomed as victims of the ‘Hun’ and dispersed across more than 2,500 War Refugees Committee local groups. Most returned home after 1918. The First World War also brought lascars, Caribbean and African colonial troops to British ports, and a small Chinese seafaring community to Limehouse. From 1933 around 70,000 European Jews escaped Nazi persecution to Britain, including the 10,000 Jewish children of the 1938–39 Kindertransport. Polish service personnel who had fought with the Allies were given the right to settle by the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act — the first major piece of British legislation explicitly designed to welcome a refugee group.
War also reshaped the institutions handling migration. The 1914 Aliens Restriction Act — passed within days of the outbreak of war — gave the Home Office sweeping powers over ‘enemy aliens’. The 1919 Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act extended these wartime controls into peacetime. By the late 1930s, refugees from Nazism faced visa requirements that had not existed in 1905. The arc from 1905 to 1939 shows the state acquiring more and more discretion over who could enter Britain.
Empire’s End and the 1948 Nationality Act
The post-war story is dominated by decolonisation and the British Nationality Act of 1948. The Act created a single status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ that gave everyone in Britain and its colonies the right to live and work in Britain. Its primary purpose was to keep a common citizenship across the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) at a moment when those countries were drafting their own nationality laws. Caribbean migration was an unintended consequence. On 22 June 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. The ship’s landing cards record 1,027 passengers, of whom 802 gave a Caribbean country as their last place of residence; the familiar figure of 492 comes from newspaper reports written at the time. Many of those aboard were ex-RAF servicemen returning to a Britain short of labour. Smaller Caribbean ships had arrived earlier, but the press coverage of the Windrush made it the symbol of a new era.
Caribbean migration grew steadily through the 1950s, encouraged by London Transport, the new National Health Service (founded 1948) and British Rail, which actively recruited workers from Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad. Migration from India, Pakistan and (after 1971) Bangladesh followed; East African Asians arrived after Kenya’s independence and the 1972 Ugandan expulsion. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and 1971 Immigration Act narrowed Commonwealth migration sharply. By the 1970s the post-war ‘open door’ was effectively closed.
A common error is to claim that the 1948 Act was designed to invite Caribbean labour to Britain. The opposite is closer to the truth. The Act’s primary purpose was to preserve a common Imperial citizenship after the white Dominions began drafting their own nationality laws. Civil servants and ministers were genuinely surprised when Caribbean men — who held the same citizenship in law — began arriving in numbers from 1948. By 1962 the same governing party, now anxious about scale, would pass the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to limit the migration the 1948 Act had accidentally enabled. Strong answers identify the 1948 Act as a Dominions law that produced an unintended Caribbean migration.
The Empire Windrush’s arrival on 22 June 1948 is the iconic image of post-war Caribbean migration, but it was not the first ship. The Ormonde had brought around 100 Jamaicans in March 1947 and the Almanzora followed at the end of that year. Caribbean servicemen had also been stationed in Britain through the war. Windrush matters because the Pathé newsreel of its arrival made the migration visible to the British public, but it was not unique. Strong answers describe Windrush as iconic rather than as a first.
The Restriction Era: 1962 to 1981
The Conservative government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 ended free movement from the Commonwealth. Migrants from former colonies now needed a Ministry of Labour voucher to enter Britain, allocated by job category. Numbers fell sharply after 1962 but family reunion continued. A second Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968 was passed in just three days specifically to keep East African Asians with British passports out of Britain — many had fled Kenya’s ‘Africanisation’ policies. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 20 April 1968 sat alongside this legislation, framing Commonwealth migration as a threat. The 1971 Immigration Act narrowed entry further to those with a parent or grandparent born in Britain (‘patriality’), a measure that effectively privileged the descendants of white Dominions settlers. The 1981 British Nationality Act completed the framework by abolishing the ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ status created in 1948.
Anti-discrimination law developed in parallel. The 1965 Race Relations Act made discrimination unlawful in public places; the 1968 Race Relations Act extended it to housing and employment; the 1976 Race Relations Act created the Commission for Racial Equality. The 1972 Ugandan Asian expulsion brought around 28,000 East African Asian refugees to Britain — many of them to Leicester — and prompted both the toughening of immigration law and the strengthening of race-relations law in the same decade.
EU Enlargement and the Modern Era
In 2004, eight new EU member states (the ‘A8’), including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, gained free movement rights. Britain (alongside Ireland and Sweden) opened its labour market immediately rather than imposing the seven-year transitional controls used by France and Germany. The result was the largest single peacetime migration in British history: around one million Polish migrants by 2017 (around 900,000 still resident). The 2016 Brexit referendum was driven, in part, by the politics of this migration, and free movement ended on 31 December 2020, with the EU Settlement Scheme closing to most applicants in June 2021. The roles of the popular press, of national newspapers and of social media in shaping public attitudes through this period mirror, on a much larger scale, the press hostility to Eastern European Jewish migrants in the 1880s and 1890s. The 2018 Windrush scandal — in which long-settled Caribbean migrants were wrongly threatened with deportation — revealed the human consequences of layered immigration laws stretching back to the 1962 Act.
Four pieces of legislation shaped post-war migration: the 1948 British Nationality Act (open Commonwealth citizenship); the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (vouchers required); the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (East African Asians); and the 1971 Immigration Act (‘patriality’). Each was a response to the migration the previous one had produced.