Abstract
Britain’s immediate post-war years are often associated with the nationalisation of industry, the growth of the welfare state and the creation of the National Health Service but seldom with an active migration and foreign labour policy. This chapter will focus on the roughly 80,000 socalled European Volunteer Workers (EVWs), former displaced persons (DPs) recruited by British government officials mainly in Germany and Austria under the Balt Cygnet and Westward Ho schemes.1 The employment of foreign labour was the result of a significant demand for labour in the ‘old industries’ such as mining, iron, steel and textiles but also in the public health system and in agriculture, where large numbers of Italian and German prisoners of war had already been set to work on the land. To fill the gap in the labour market more permanently, Ministry of Labour officials eventually went to DP camps on the continent to recruit foreign workers. This chapter will argue that post-war British ‘migration policy’ had been supplemented by a ‘migrant policy’. Therefore the contemporary idea of ‘assimilation’ will be highlighted, and its translation into practice will be analysed.
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Notes
For an overview, see Diana Kay and Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain 1946–1951, London: Routledge, 1992.
John Allen Tannahill, European Volunteer Workers in Britain, Manchester: University Press, 1958, p. 133.
See also Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), European Immigrants in Britain 1933–1950, Munich: Saur, 2003; Labour & Love. Deutsche in Großbritannien nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Osnabrück: Secolo, 2000; German Migrants in Post-War Britain. An Enemy Embrace, London: Routledge, 2006.
Johannes Paulmann, Staat und Arbeitsmarkt in Großbritannien. Krise, Weltkrieg, Wiederaufbau, Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993, p. 334.
Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Nach Holocaust und Zweangsarbeit. Britische Humanitäre Hilfe in Deutschland. Die Helfer, die Befreiten und die Deutschen, Osnabrück: Secolo, 2007.
Alec Cairncross, Years of Recovery. British Economic Policy 1945–51, London: Meuthen, 1985, p. 394.
Pat Thane, ‘Women since 1945’, in Paul Johnson (ed.), Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change, London: Longman, 1994, pp. 394–5.
Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise. Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968, London: Tavistock, 1980, p. 23.
For the British DP policy in Europe, see Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond Camps and Forced Labour. Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution. Proceedings of the first international multidisciplinary conference, held at the Imperial War Museum London, 29–31 January 2003, Osnabrück: Secolo, 2005, pp. 3–8 (CD).
Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, London: Allen & Unwin, 1953, p. 343.
Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration. Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’ Relations in Post-war Britain, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 27.
Robert Miles, Racism after ‘Race Relations’, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 140.
Tannahill, Workers, p. 21. Kay and Miles, Refugees, 1992, pp. 48–9.
Julius Isaac, British Post-War Migration, Cambridge: University Press, 1954, p. 180. Of 17,600 DPs who had arrived in Britain by 28 July 1947, only 3900 were women. PRO FO 371/66713, Cabinet, Foreign Labour Committee, 31.7.1947.
PRO FO 371/66709, COGA to ACA(BE) Vienna, 1.3.1947. David Cesarani, Justice Delayed. How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals, London: Heinemann, 1992, pp. 4–5.
William I. Thomas, Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1971 [1921], pp. 271, 308.
See also Leo Lucassen, ‘The Gull Between Long Term and Short Term Approaches in Immigration Studies. A Reassessment of the Chicago School’s Assimilation Concept’, in IMIS-Beiträge vol. 5 (1997), pp. 523, here: p. 9.
G. W. Killick, The History and Work of the Cotton Board, Guildford: Empire Cotton Growing Review, 1954, p. 8.
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© 2011 Johannes-Dieter Steinert
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Steinert, JD. (2011). British Post-War Migration Policy and Displaced Persons in Europe. In: Reinisch, J., White, E. (eds) The Disentanglement of Populations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297685_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297685_11
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