Ekow Eshun

Back in 1601, Queen Elizabeth I delivered Britain’s first recorded anti-immigration speech. Calling for the banishment of “the great numbers of negars and Blackamoores, most of them infidels, who are fostered and fed here to the great annoyance of (my) people,” she ordered them to be rounded up and expelled from the country. In fact the number of blacks in Britain at that time, most of them slaves of the gentry, was negligible. And, as is apparent from the number of negars and Blackamoores that continue to dwell here, her wishes proved impossible to fulfil. Today the idea that UK would be better off without blacks is only held by reactionaries and racists. So why is it that Elizabeth’s fear of immigrants still persists?

The newest threat comes from workers in the 10 new EU states who will gain right of movement through Europe on May 1. The combined population of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slov-enians, Cypriots, Maltese and the citizens of the three Baltic republics is 75 million. And apparently many of them are heading towards Britain. The UK Home Secretary David Blunkett will announce measures on February 23 to restrict employment and benefit rights to workers from the new states.

But why the panic? Home Office figures predict that between 5,000 and 13,000 migrant workers from the 10 states will arrive in Britain in the first year after 1 May. Last week the UK Institute for Public Policy Research released figures suggesting that number would fall to around 2,500 by 2015. By 2030 the institute reports, more workers will be leaving than entering Britain as living standards rise in their home countries.

Yet fears of an alien swamping of the British way of life continue, fuelled by scare stories from the Conservatives, the tabloid newspapers and anti-immigration groups such as Migration Watch. What none of these voices seems to notice is that we’ve been here before. The immigration scare is nothing new. Over the decades, Britain has faced the apparent threat of invasion from Jews, Irish, West Indians, Ugandan Asians, Vietna-mese, Bangladeshis, Somalis and, most recently, the 1.6 million Eastern European Roma. The complexion of the people changes but the rhetoric is always the same. Since Elizabeth I, immigrants have been stealing jobs from honest working men, fouling the air with their noxious foods and perverting culture with their arcane customs. Yet somehow Britain endures. Its institutions do not crumble. Instead the immigrants become part of the patchwork whole of the nation, even as another barbarian horde is sighted at the gates and the same process begins over.

Fear of immigration hinges on dread of otherness. Immigrants are loathed from a distance but belatedly welcome when it’s realised they are as ordinary and flawed and funny and civil as the rest of us. The fact is that immigration will bring change to a country.

Yet that’s only to be feared if you assume the results will be ruinous. In fact the

opposite is true. The real peril after May 1 is not the false millions gathering

beyond our shores, but that we might lose sight of the fact that successive waves of immigration have taught Britain to be a more open, more tolerant place. It is ‘they’ who have made ‘us’ more civilised. — The Guardian, London