England's Tumultuous Migration Issue Confronting Race & Class
S. E. Anderson
by Paul Kléber Monod.
Cambridge, 396 pp., £35, February, 978 1 009 65229 2
by Ian Goldin.
Old Street, 272 pp., £9.99, March 2025, 978 1 913083 73 1
by Ece Temelkuran.
Canongate, 256 pp., £11.99, April, 978 1 83726 204 5
We have the king’s own word for the massacre. He ordered it, after all. In a royal charter Ethelred recalled that ‘a decree was sent out by me, with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockles among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination.’
On St Brice’s Day, 13 November 1002, the terrified Danes of Oxford broke open the doors of St Frideswide’s Church and barricaded themselves within, but ‘the people of the town and suburbs’ (not Ethelred’s troops) set fire to the church and murdered the lot of them. A thousand years later, in 2008, excavations at St John’s College uncovered 37 sturdy Nordic skeletons, all men aged between 16 and 25. Some English historians suggested that this was a rare instance of Ethelred’s orders being carried out. But the following year, archaeologists excavating the site of the new Weymouth bypass discovered 54 skeletons of young men who had been decapitated around the same date, all Scandinavians according to their DNA. More new bypasses might well uncover further victims of St Brice’s Day. At all events, Christ Church Cathedral was built on the site of the first notable massacre carried out by Englishmen.
The next massacre of note – the killing of the entire Jewish population of York in 1190 – was a freelance effort, although there were rumours that Richard I was behind it. Again, the intended victims huddled together and took refuge. Again, their refuge was set alight and all within died, although many of them, perhaps the majority, set fire to themselves to prevent their bodies being mutilated post mortem. Again, this was not an isolated episode. The violence against the Jews spread from Old Jewry in London to Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and King’s Lynn. In Lincoln, the Jews managed to barricade themselves in the castle until the persecution subsided.
The next century was, if possible, even worse. Henry III, his son Edward I and their enemy Simon de Montfort agreed on little else except the need to get rid of the Jews. De Montfort has clung on to his place in the English pantheon as the prime originator of parliamentary government. His role in murdering the entire Jewish population of London in 1264 is less well remembered; ditto, the smaller pogroms that his sons Henry and Simon organised in Winchester, Worcester and Canterbury. Edward I finished the job. Soon after coming to the throne, he passed the Statute of Jewry, banning Jews from moneylending and ordering that they wear a badge of yellow felt. These measures were hugely popular, as was the final expulsion of the starving and demoralised remnants of the community in 1290. In gratitude, the knights of the shire voted the king a luscious new tax.
Historians tend to concentrate on Edward’s legal reforms or even his wars against the Welsh and the Scots rather than his treatment of the Jewish population of England. Similarly, the usual narrative of the Peasants’ Revolt describes John Ball and Wat Tyler’s march to London, Ball’s sermon at Blackheath (‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’) and the brave conduct of the young Richard II. We don’t often hear about the massacre of the Flemings in Cheapside on 14 June, though it was at the heart of the revolt and an episode of frenzied violence. According to a contemporary chronicle, the rebels ‘beheaded without judgment or trial all the Flemings they found, so that mounds of corpses were to be seen in the streets and various spots were littered with the headless bodies of the slain. In this way, they passed the entire day, bent only on the massacre of the Flemings.’ They asked potential victims to pronounce ‘bread and cheese’ and killed those who replied ‘brode’ and ‘case’. Similar linguistic quizzings are recorded in Continental race massacres of the same period. They derive ultimately from Judges 12, where the Gileadites stop the defeated Ephraimites from retreating across the Jordan and kill those who cannot say ‘shibboleth’ properly. The rebels of 1381 carried banners displaying the cross of St George, only recently appointed patron saint of England.
The fate of the Flemings was remembered by Chaucer when he wrote ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ only a few years later. The priest says of a noisy fox hunt: ‘Jack Straw and his men/Never shouted half so shrill/When they would any Fleming kill.’ The Flemings were mostly weavers or other skilled artisans, and were sharp economic competitors, hence their unpopularity. The same is true of the victims of the Evil May Day riots of 1517. Again, many of them were Flemish weavers, but the foreign merchants and bankers of Lombard Street were also targeted. All were accused of stealing jobs from English workers. The rioters were mostly displaced young apprentices. Thomas More, then under-sheriff of London, came out to meet them at St Martin-le-Grand and tried to persuade them to return home. His speech is reimagined in the play Sir Thomas More, written by many hands, including Shakespeare. More reproaches them for their ‘barbarous inhumanity’:
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail.
In the play, this great speech does the trick. In real life, the rioters ignored his appeal and went on chucking stones and bricks and throwing hot water out of windows at More and his party until they were dispersed by the lord mayor’s armed men.
In his sweeping survey of the ideas the English have had of themselves, Paul Kléber Monod mentions these early examples of murderous race riots. It would be unfair to conclude from them that the English have been vindictively and incurably racist. But it would be equally dubious to deduce from counter-examples – the broad welcome given to the French Huguenots in the 17th century, for example (the word ‘refugee’ was coined to describe their plight) – that the English have been habitually warm and friendly to outsiders.
The refugee crisis of 1709 shows the way a sudden influx of migrants could inflame public opinion. Thousands of German Protestants, fleeing the war-ravaged Rhineland Palatinate, had sailed down the Rhine to Rotterdam, hoping to find a refuge in England. The Whigs welcomed these persecuted fellow Protestants, but offered only temporary shelter in ‘tented cities’ and planned to move them on to the American colonies. Defoe wrote a passionate pamphlet in favour of the ‘poor Palatines’ and Parliament passed the Foreign Protestants Naturalisation Act, which allowed incomers of the right religion to become British for a small fee. But public opinion erupted in indignation, fanned by the Tory leaders, who after gaining power immediately repealed the Act. By then, the Palatines had mostly been shovelled off to Ireland and New York. Very few had taken advantage of Britain’s short-lived spurt of generosity and become British citizens. They were received no more generously in Ireland, from which most of them swiftly returned. And in the American colonies ‘the Palatine boors’, as Benjamin Franklin called them, became the first new arrivals targeted by English settlers. Public opinion in England was also often hostile to the influx of refugees from revolutionary France, and the Aliens Act of 1793, which monitored foreigners arriving in the country, slowed immigration to a trickle for the next thirty years.
After race riots in the East End, Parliament reintroduced immigration controls in the Aliens Act of 1905, designed to keep out Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. The last half-century has seen an unprecedented flurry of legislation to control immigration – from the Tories in 1962, Labour in 1968, the Tories again in 1971, as well as a series of lesser laws – until the grand culmination of Brexit in 2016 and the fresh unfurling of St George flags completed a millennium of pogroms and riots.
The English have been no more friendly towards their immediate neighbours. Monod traces the tortuous interweaving of English identity and the larger British identity that was supposed to subsume it after the Act of Union. Among other obstacles, he points to the abusive stereotypes to which the English have instinctively resorted in describing the Welsh, Scots and, above all, the Irish over the centuries, starting with Gerald of Wales (who was mostly English) in the 1180s: ‘The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life.’ Oliver Cromwell described his slaughter of 3500 Irish men at Drogheda as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches’. The Welsh, according to the Reverend William Richards in Wallography, his vicious travelogue of 1682, ‘are much addicted to the sin of Nastiness, wallowing in filthiness like so many swine; so that the whole province seems to be but a general Sty’. In addition, they were lazy, larcenous and spoke gibberish. If the Welsh were thieves, the Scots were flea-ridden cattle rustlers. Pepys marvelled that ‘so universal a rooted nastiness hangs about the person of every Scot (man or woman)’ as to render him ‘nauseous’. The language grew, if anything, more malevolent over the centuries. In 1861 Charles Kingsley described the Irish as ‘white chimpanzees’.
By contrast, Monod reminds us of the benign image the English have cultivated of themselves, achieving a peak of self-love in the early 20th century. Stanley Baldwin’s St George’s Day speech of 1924: ‘I think that the English are at heart and in practice the kindest people in the world.’ Or George Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic.’ Or J.B. Priestley in English Journey: ‘I wish I had been born early enough to be called a little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love.’ And perhaps most remarkable of all because less expected, E.M. Forster’s definition of English culture in England Speaks (1941): ‘The English countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play, English prudishness and smugness, English freakishness, the mild English idealism and good-humoured reasonableness.’ It’s ‘English, English’ all the way – ‘British’ never quite fits. Monod doesn’t mention Flanders and Swann’s ‘Song of Patriotic Prejudice’ (1964), which encapsulates a millennium of English self-praise and contempt for their dirty, mean, hairy neighbours: ‘The English are moral, the English are good,/And clever and modest and misunderstood.’
It is essential to this image of the English as a mild, unobtrusive race that the British Empire should be thought of as a kind of accident. As John Seeley, in his enormously influential The Expansion of England (1883), put it: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ On the contrary, the English displayed from the start a flinty purpose and unflagging energy in ‘expanding’ themselves. The most indelible words in any statute must be those in Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals (1532): ‘This realm of England is an Empire.’ The English Crown had already ‘planted’ quite a few of her people in the castle towns of North Wales, where Edward I inflicted a sort of apartheid on the Welsh. Far larger plantations were to follow in Munster under Elizabeth, then in Ulster in the 1600s, where more than a hundred thousand people, many of them Lowland Scots, were settled on land vacated by the flight of the Catholic earls. ‘Settled’ was never more of a euphemism. From that day to this, there has been loathing and bloodshed between the two communities. Visiting Derry during the Troubles in February 1989, three hundred years after the Apprentice Boys defended the city walls against the Jacobites, I saw the guns of British Tommies poking through the same arrowslits. This rough cementing of the English ethnic empire was the launchpad for the global British enterprise, in which many ‘Celtic’ Brits played a part. Has any other nation shown such a consistent eagerness to say goodbye to its surplus citizens?
By contrast, immigration has often been characterised as a deviation from the settled state of the country, with borders as the bulwark of national existence rather than a mere administrative convenience. Yet ‘hard borders’ are a creation of the modern age. Until the late 19th century, borders almost everywhere were more or less open, often fuzzy or undecided, and the inspection of passports rarely enforced, even where passports existed.
As a refresher course in historical reality, I recommend Ian Goldin’s Shortest History of Migration. Goldin is a multiple migrant, his family originally from Lithuania, he himself finishing up in England, via South Africa, France and the US. Had his parents and grandparents not fled, they would have perished in the pogroms or the Holocaust, as the other members of their families did. Goldin’s whirlwind chronicle of migration through the ages is not, however, simply a chronicle of disasters avoided but of opportunities embraced. We are reminded of the enormous distances that the first humans covered on foot, venturing out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, then up into Europe, and east across Asia, reaching down into Australia, and up into China and across Beringia – the land bridge then between Russia and Alaska – then down the Americas, to reach Argentina around twelve thousand years ago. Their technologies travelled with them – the horse, the wheel, the cart, sail and later steam, rail, the motor car, the aeroplane. ‘Migrants,’ Goldin argues, ‘have been at the heart of all major advances in civilisation.’ This is not the story many people like to tell. On the contrary, the growth of civilisation is more comfortably seen as a process of settlement. As Robin Cohen puts it in Migration: The Movement of Humankind from Prehistory to the Present (2019), ‘we often imagine civilisation as the triumph of the sedentary over the mobile’ – from hunter-gatherer to farmer, from nomad to villager and city-dweller.
The history of voluntary migration is bound up with the long and terrible history of forced migration. The capture and transportation of Nubian slaves are documented in early papyrus records and on Egyptian wall reliefs carved more than four thousand years ago. Between the eleventh century and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an estimated six million enslaved people from Russian and Central Asia were transported to the Black Sea by the agents of Genoa and Venice. Over the course of the next few centuries, more than twelve million Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the Triangular Trade: guns, knives, cloth and alcohol went to Africa, slaves to America, where they were put to work on plantations growing sugar, coffee and tobacco, which were then exported to Europe on the home leg. Millions more died resisting capture or on the journey across the Atlantic.
Then there were the lesser forms of slavery: ‘indentured labour’, or the ‘coolie labour’ that built the roads, bridges and ports of the British Empire. Goldin tells the story of Richard Frethorne, who arrived in Virginia in 1622 at the age of twelve to work on a plantation and wrote home to his father and mother: ‘I have nothing to comfort me; nor is there nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death.’ He had been indentured under the 1601 Poor Law, which entitled the parish to collar children whose parents were receiving poor relief. Thousands of children were sent to the West Indies and the American colonies. Richard Frethorne died less than two years after writing his letter.
The use of forced displacement continued well into the 19th century. After the potato crop failed in Sligo in 1845, the young Lord Palmerston ‘shovelled out’ two thousand of his tenants to Canada. According to the emigration officers, many were ‘in the most abject state of poverty, with barely sufficient rags upon their person to cover their nakedness’. Palmerston’s agents claimed that at least his tenants’ rations were better than those provided by his neighbour Lord Lansdowne. Palmerston had himself intervened to send puncheons of the best Jamaica rum for the emigrants. When the clergy complained about this, he ordered that they be given coffee and biscuits instead. Even so, the authorities at St John, New Brunswick sent Palmerston a scathing letter, wondering that he ‘should have exposed such a numerous and distressed portion of his tenantry to the severity and privation of a New Brunswick winter, unprovided with the common means of support, with broken-down constitutions and almost in a state of nudity’.
The removal of so many superfluous tenants did wonders for Palmerston’s bank balance. Ten years later, the annual rents from his Sligo properties had risen from £4467 to £7370, enabling him to build the romantic baronial keep of Classiebawn, looking out over Mullaghmore harbour. Palmerston’s eventual heirs, Lord Mountbatten and his family, were staying at Classiebawn when they set out on their fatal fishing expedition and were blown up by the IRA. British observers were not only horrified, but puzzled that the Irish should choose to murder such a harmless old royal. Why was it such a puzzle?
At least Palmerston’s tenants reached New Brunswick. Today’s emigrants crossing the Channel or the Mediterranean are often not so lucky. Several hundred have drowned in overloaded inflatables struggling across the Channel in the last decade. The statistics for the Med are even more horrifying. More than 28,000 people have died there since 2014, the death toll of a medium-sized war. Yet the reaction of the authorities – and the media – in most countries has been callous and impotent.
Those who survive the crossing and gain asylum are expected to show gratitude. As Ece Temelkuran puts it, ‘even before I begin, the fear of appearing as yet another whining exile demanding recognition fractures my dignity.’ Temelkuran is a political exile who has chosen not to go back to Turkey, because critics of the regime are being locked up in droves. She does not pretend that living in the Nation of Strangers is much fun: ‘When one is a stranger, one has to be politely content with what the settled-down folk have to offer.’ Stories of the road are told by those who have made it back, like Odysseus or the Children of Israel; those with no prospect of return must remain silent.
It’s a curious thing that most songs of emigrant sadness have been composed by comfortably settled non-emigrants. ‘Danny Boy’ was written by an English barrister. ‘Canadian Boat Song’ (‘the heart is Highland/And we in dreams behold the Hebrides’) was written by an Edinburgh advocate (or conceivably by Sir Walter Scott). ‘The Fields of Athenry’, the definitive ballad of transportation, was written by a Dublin folk singer two hundred years after the traumatic events it recalls. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was composed by two Englishmen who met in a pub in Worcestershire. The definitive song of slave suffering, ‘Ol’ Man River’, was composed by Oscar Hammerstein Jr, the son of a Broadway producer.
In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It is our national and/or racial identity that is being fractured; our self-confidence in ‘who we are’ that is being undermined. What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the ‘people of England’ are, as it were, a settled question, that the days of large-scale movements belong to the past, or ought to.
Some influxes – prompted by better-paid work, for instance – are seasonal. But even the settlements that are classified as permanent are by no means irreversible. Diasporas are noisy and conspicuous: the clatter of feet down the gangways of the Mayflower and the Windrush, the foreign faces and foreign voices in the high street, the massing of incomers in this or that run-down district. By contrast, remigration is a quiet and gradual process: homebound passengers slipping one by one into their seats on planes or long-distance buses, their families eventually following. The descendants of the Irish navvies who built Victorian roads and railways have year by year trickled home, even to what were called the Congested Districts of the West, Palmerston’s country. I remember Garret FitzGerald as taoiseach in the 1980s quietly exulting that, for the first time since the Famine, there were more Irish people returning to Ireland than leaving it (though it will still be a long time, if ever, before Ireland regains its population peaks of the early 1840s). Last autumn, Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, was able to make the same boast about his own country.
This process is now happening throughout the EU: 37,000 Romanians left the UK in the year to June 2025 and only 14,000 arrived, according to the Office of National Statistics. The same is true of Bulgaria, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal; in each case, between five and ten thousand of their nationals left Britain last year, and many fewer arrived. You might expect this trend to be welcomed by the tabloids. On the contrary, it is either ignored, or mentioned only as proof of the horrific state of Britain: crime, a crumbling NHS, the rising cost of living. This ingenious reverse is executed with total disregard for the official statistics, which record falling rates for most crimes and rising satisfaction with the health service. Nigel Farage refuses to accept the evidence of the British Crime Survey, claiming that most people just chuck the questionnaire in the bin. The belief that immigration sends crime rates soaring is one of the 22 myths listed by the Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas in How Migration Really Works (2023); in fact, crime tends to be lower in immigrant areas. Other myths include the belief that ‘migration is at an all-time high’ (the rate was much higher in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), that illegal immigration is out of control (in fact, the vast majority of people migrate legally in response to active labour recruitment), that ‘immigrants steal jobs and drive down wages’ (in fact, they fill vacancies and voluminous research in Europe and the US shows that the labour market impact of immigration is negligible).
These currents are nothing new. Romania may have lost a fifth of its population after the overthrow of the Ceauşescu regime in 1989, but in the 19th century Ireland and Norway suffered far worse drops. In Norway, appalling harvests combined with potato blights caused a third of the population – almost a million people – to emigrate to the US. Today there are almost as many Norwegian-Americans in the US as there are Norwegians in Norway. When President trump complains, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway?’ he ignores the fact that in the latter half of the 19th century Norway was itself a shithole country, whose citizens were queuing for the next available Cunard liner. trump himself is directly descended from the Drumpf family of Kallstadt, who were among the Palatines forced on England in the early 19th century. trump’s father liked to pretend he was of Swedish descent, and trump repeated this in The Art of the Deal, but was later persuaded to reveal that he was a ‘Palatine boor’.
Norway is now one of the most prosperous nations on Earth and, like all successful countries, has become a magnet for immigrants. At the same time, its fertility rate has dropped to 1.42, way below replacement rate, lower even than Britain’s 1.55 and France’s 1.64. Such increase in population as there is comes from immigration, principally from Poland and Ukraine, but also from such places as Syria, Somalia, Eritrea and Iraq. As elsewhere, this has stirred up fierce hostility and fuelled the far right.
Norway and other European countries face two conflicting challenges. The first is to keep the civil peace, which means having restrictions of some sort on immigration. This can be done by non-violent legal means, for example by making ID cards compulsory; or it can be done by intimidation of the ICE variety. The resources of modern states are so great that it isn’t all that difficult to bring the numbers down, as the UK, Germany and the US have done. In the UK, net migration dropped to 204,000 in the year to June 2025, from the freak peak of nearly a million in the Boriswave.
The other challenge is much more formidable. Very soon, almost all Western countries will begin to see their populations fall.* Reversing this trend is a mountainous task. For much of the period since the Great War, France has had a pro-natalist policy. President Macron has called for ‘demographic rearmament’, earning the enthusiastic approval of Elon Musk (fourteen children to date), and for a time his efforts did seem to be having some effect. But now France’s birth rate is slipping back to the European average. Viktor Orbán tried hard to generate more Hungarians, devoting 5 per cent of GDP to the effort. Numbers increased a little (though not to replacement rate) before dropping again. The UK has not bestirred itself much. The two-child benefit cap was expressly designed to deter large families. The Tories, who brought in this weird measure in 2017, seem wedded to it. Farage wants to keep it, but only for children born to immigrants – a distinction repellent even by his standards.
On present policies, the population will soon begin to fall. In London, schools are running out of pupils, and councils are facing the painful task of deciding which ones to close (so much for the myth about immigration putting terrible pressure on school places). As for the labour market, it’s not just that the locals don’t fancy back-breaking work in the fields or in Amazon warehouses. It’s that there aren’t enough locals to go around. Future governments are likely to be stuck with a pair of discordant policies: the restriction of immigration, which will be as effective as we want it to be; and the promotion of the birth rate, which won’t. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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