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Today’s Britain
is the product of thousands of years of invasion, migration and
settlement that have created the continually changing mosaic
of faiths, cultures, languages, dialects, physical features,
skills, traditions and identities that make up the British people.
Recent research has identified over 200 ethnic groups in Britain
based on the surnames of those registered to vote. Visit the Origins
Info website
to find the origins of your own surname.
Archaeologist David Miles describes Britain as ‘A place
created by immigrants which excels in xenophobia’. With a
falling birth rate, Miles believes that Britain will continue to
need immigrants to maintain its current level of population and
prosperity. History has shown that successive immigrant groups,
while facing initial hostility, are generally able to settle as
established communities and make a positive contribution to the
British economy and quality of life. In the conclusion to his book
The Tribes of Britain, Miles refers to this country as being ‘refreshed
and stimulated by new arrivals who, despite the difficulties, merge
with its people to create a constantly changing new Britain’.
Those new arrivals have included:
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Hunter-gatherers who re-colonised
Britain after the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago.
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Neolithic migrant farmers from the Near East
and southern Europe who arrived about 4,000BC and were the
forebears of the Celts, a collective name that covered a number
of ancient tribes including the Britons, Gaels and Picts.
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The Roman invaders who successfully conquered
much of Britain in AD43 and remained an occupying force for
nearly 400 years.
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Subsequent invaders such as the Angles, Saxons,
Jutes, Franks, Vikings and, in 1066, the Normans.
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Jewish people who were readmitted to the country
in 1656 on the orders of Oliver Cromwell after being expelled
from Britain by Edward I in 1290.They came mainly from Spain,
Portugal, southern France, Hamburg and Amsterdam. They were
later followed by thousands of Jews fleeing the pogroms of
Tsarist Russia and persecution by the Nazis.
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50,000 Huguenots escaping persecution in France
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Irish people leaving for the mainland during
the famine of the 1840s and the economic depression of the
1920s, many of whom settled in Liverpool.
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145,000 Poles who settled in Britain after World
War Two.
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91,000 volunteer workers, mainly Russians, who
came to Britain as a result of post-war recruitment drives
in displaced persons camps in Europe.
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Hungarians escaping the backlash that followed
the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Czechs escaping Czechoslovakia
following the collapse of the Prague Spring of 1968.
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Many of the 40,000 Cypriots who were made homeless
by the civil war in Cyprus.
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Indian labourers who contributed to the massive
British post-war rebuilding programme, and Pakistanis recruited
to work in the textile mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire during
the 1960s.
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Bangladeshis escaping the Indo-Pakistani war
who came to London in the early 1970s – many settling
in the Spitalfields area that was once home to Hugeunot, Jewish
and Irish communities – and Tamils fleeing the civil
war in Sri Lanka.
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Ugandan and Kenyan Asians expelled by new nationalist
leaders in East Africa in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
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Americans coming to work for multinational companies
in the 1980s.
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Australians, New Zealanders and white South
Africans claiming entry on the basis of family ties.
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Somali people escaping the civil war in Somalia
that began in 1991.
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447,000 Eastern Europeans from countries that
joined the European Economic Community on 1 May 2004. |
Today, one of the immigrant groups that attracts the most
media interest is that of asylum seekers. Asylum seekers arrive
in a host country and then apply to be officially recognised as
refugees. Those whose applications are turned down because it is
thought any risk they may face is not sufficient to warrant refugee
status may be forcibly repatriated, though some are still allowed
to remain on humanitarian grounds. In 2005 around 25,000 people
applied for asylum in Britain, a fall of 25 per cent compared to
the previous year. The inflammatory words of some newspapers and
politicians on the subject of asylum seekers, as well as about
the number of Eastern Europeans coming to Britain, is fuelling
tension and immigration has once again become a major topic on
the political agenda.
See the BBC’s Born Abroad website for details of new research on immigration. This links
to the Destination Britain website.
See the BBC’s
Immigration and Emigration website for a clickable
map that provides information on migration to and from the regions
of the UK.
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Kenyan Asian families arriving at Heathrow,
c 1967 (Science and Society/NMPFT Daily Herald Archive).
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