From Open Borders to Brexit
The history of migration into Britain, 1905 to 2020. This session forms part of the Dialogue in Migration and Refugee Studies Lecture and Seminar Series.

The lecture will look at the current debates on migration from a historical perspective.
Contrary to the popular perception of border controls as natural, restrictive immigration policies are in fact a relatively recent phenomenon in world history. The open borders regime and liberal asylum laws of the nineteenth century were gradually eroded in Britain by a series of increasingly restrictive measures, starting with the Aliens Restriction Act of 1905 which limited immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. In the first half of the twentieth century not only Jews but also Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants in Britain were faced with religiously motivated hostility and widespread discrimination in employment and housing. It was only with the arrival of “non-white” immigrants from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean that xenophobic prejudice towards less visible migrant groups started to disappear in the 1960s. We will then discuss how the anti-immigrant discourse and the somewhat openly racist rhetoric associated with the Brexit referendum campaign can be located within the broader context of migration history in twentieth-century Britain and beyond.
This online lecture will be given by Dr Michal Palacz from the Post Doctoral Research Assistant in History at Oxford Brookes University. The session forms part of the Dialogue in Migration and Refugee Studies Lecture and Seminar Series, funded by the Jean Monnet grant. The series runs every 2 weeks, with online lectures from experts in different disciplines.