Every winter, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. The homes they seek are the rural villages and families they left behind to seek work in the booming coastal cities. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance.
Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. But in a bitter irony, the Zhangs’ hopes for the future are undone by their very absence. Qin, the child they left behind, has grown into adolescence crippled by a sense of abandonment. In an act of teenage rebellion, she drops out of school. She too will become a migrant worker. The decision is a heartbreaking blow for the parents.
Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ attempts to change their daughter’s course and repair their ruptured family. Intimate and candid, the film paints a human portrait of the dramatic changes sweeping China.
The struggles of middle-aged and older Americans during this economic downturn have been well documented. But what about the “millennials,” those born during the Reagan-Bush era? Starting your first job search during a recession can result in challenges that last for years, studies say. Need to Know’s Alison Stewart spoke with some recent grads who are just starting out — pounding the pavement to land that first job.
How rich are the baby boomers and how poor are their children?
David Willetts will analyse the distribution of income and wealth between different generations in Britain. He will investigate why the baby boomer generation have done particularly well for both income and wealth. He will then look at why the younger generation face much less favourable economic circumstances. Drawing on his new book The Pinch he will firmly place the issue of fairness between the generations on the political agenda.
On how immigrants help both the countries they leave and those to which they move.
The largest migration in history: China’s migrant worker
Almost everywhere on the world, international migration is a hot topic. Most of the time the debate about migration is fierce and charged with prejudices and fears. At the political level, this has far-reaching consequences, ranging from electoral victories of populist right-wing parties to the increasing isolation policy of Europe and the United States.
BUT WHAT EXACTLY IS MIGRATION?
What are its causes? And what are problems and opportunities?
EXEPTIONAL PEOPLE
How migration shaped our world and will define our future
Migration has played a critical role in human history–the circulation of ideas and technologies has benefited communities and the movement of people across oceans and continents has fuelled economies. In this lecture which draws on the issues raised in the book Exceptional People Ian Goldin shows how migrants in today’s world connect markets, fill labour gaps, and enrich social diversity. Migration also allows individuals to escape destitution, human rights abuses, and repressive regimes. Goldin argues that current migration policies are based on misconceptions and fears about migration’s long-term contributions and social dynamics and looks at ways that future policies might allow societies to effectively reap migration’s opportunities while managing the risks of the twenty-first century.
Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and professorial fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Goldin was Vice President of the World Bank (2003-2006) and prior to that the Bank’s Director of Development Policy (2001-2003). He served on the Bank’s senior management team, and was directly responsible for its relationship with the UK and all other European, North American and developed countries. Goldin led the Bank’s collaboration with the United Nations and other partners. As Director of Development Policy, Goldin played a pivotal role in the research and strategy agenda of the Bank.
From 1996 to 2001 he was Chief Executive and Managing Director of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and served as an adviser to President Nelson Mandela. His many books include Globalization for Development. Born in South Africa, Goldin has a BA (Hons) and a BSc from the University of Cape Town, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Doctorate from the University of Oxford
How far is the recent immigration to Britain a new phenomenon, which is transforming the country’s character? Or is it only the last chapter of the long story of our ability to absorb foreigners, and draw new strength from their energy and enterprise?
It is a highly topical question, and in this timely book Robert Winder provides a wealth of background information to try to reassure contemporary alarmists. He briskly traces the history of immigration, from the Normans to today’s asylum seekers, showing how each wave of foreigners provoked a new scare before they became accepted as a permanent part of the British scene.
He tells the story vividly, with fascinating contemporary quotations describing the impact of each new group of immigrants, from Jewish moneylenders to Huguenot weavers, from Irish labourers to Indian shopkeepers – until it seems hard to imagine Britain without these stimuli. He contends that we owe much more to immigrants than we think, and he hopes that by understanding the benefits “our own national pride can feel less clenched, less besieged”.
In fact, the idea of pure British blood, as he shows, has never corresponded with reality. As Daniel Defoe wrote in 1700:
A true-born Englishman’s a Contradiction
In speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction.
Defoe championed the need for foreigners and his most famous character, Robinson Crusoe – often later taken as a model for British ingenuity and self-sufficiency – was described by Defoe as an immigrant from Bremen, called Robinson Kreutznauer.
Winder provides a backstage version of British history, with fascinating descriptions of how poor immigrants arrived from across the world, including Lascars, Chinese and Gypsies. In 1764, the Gentleman’s Magazine reckoned there were 20,000 “negroe servants” in London alone. New trades and entertainments became dependent on resourceful immigrants from poorer countries: in the early 19th century, Italian organ-grinders multiplied through London, with their monkeys. Further up the social scale, rich visitors (particularly from the Indian empire) began to influence British ideas. In 1773, curry first appeared on a London menu; a few years later an Indian, SK Mahomed, established vapour baths in Brighton, and introduced the word shampoo. In the mid-19th century, the Sikh prince Duleep Singh was a member of the Carlton club, and complained about the fish knives. In 1892, the British elected the first Indian MP.
But it was the waves of mass immigrants who provoked the serious public outcries, about the threat to jobs, peace or public health; particularly the Irish refugees from the potato famine: a royal commission in 1836 reported that the Irish brought with them “filth, neglect, confusion, discomfort and insalubrity”. It was not till much later that it became clear that the shocking conditions were caused not so much by Irish habits as by the unprecedented increase in Britain’s population, which almost doubled in 40 years from 1800.
What is most striking from this history is how fitful and accidental were the patterns of immigration, and how volatile the British attitudes, as they first reacted against new waves, and then came to terms with them. It was not till the late 19th century that a serious movement arose against the “influx” of new immigrants, particularly Jews arriving in the East End of London from eastern Europe: “East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town,” said a Tory MP for Stepney.
Liberals tried to stem the public clamour to restrict immigration, including a young Winston Churchill, who urged that there was no good reason to abandon “the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum”. But the Tory government was determined, and in 1905 it passed the Aliens Act, which for the first time restricted immigration. The act was only weakly enforced, but the first world war soon tightened the restrictions and immigration would never be so free again.
In the second world war, after their first panicky detention of Germans in the Isle of Man, the British showed a more tolerant attitude to immigrants, who they needed to win the war, including thousands of Polish refugees: 14,000 joined the RAF. They were hospitable to black soldiers who came with the American forces and often appeared more courteous than the white Americans.
But the postwar black immigrants received a much more hostile reception, even though they were sanctioned by the Labour government, which faced a shortage of labour; and the arrival of Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948 provoked a backlash of racism, which was followed by more scares about Asian immigrants and by drastic legislation.
Looking back on those fierce arguments and panics about Caribbeans, Indians or Bang-ladeshis, it seems odd to see how little serious thought or information lay behind them. British governments were curiously uninterested in selecting the most productive immigrants. They were alarmed by a potential inrush of Indian traders from East Africa – who soon turned out to be invaluable additions to the economy, reviving corner-shops and pharmacies, and building up small businesses throughout Britain. They cynically changed the law to keep out the Chinese from Hong Kong, which deprived Britain of many brilliant entrepreneurs who went instead to America, Canada or Australia. They admitted tens of thousands of Indians, but made no effort to attract the highly qualified mathematicians who would play a central role in Silicon Valley in California.
What also seems odd in retrospect – which Winder only touches on – is the very limited view of “race relations”, a concept too readily imported from America. Most of the proponents of race relations in the 1950s and 60s, which became a thriving industry, omitted to discuss the most obvious way of improving relations – by intermarriage and mixed partnerships.
In America there were far fewer mixed marriages and partnerships, particularly between whites and blacks, and interracial sex was still often a taboo subject. But in Britain, white women – and later men – were much more adventurous and less racist; so that today the rate of intermarriage in Britain is the highest in Europe. The 2001 census recorded 238,000 children as “mixed race” – while the total was much higher. As Winder rightly comments: “Nothing is dissolving stiff conceptions of ‘ethnic identity’ faster.”
So how does the growing inflow over the past decade mark a real break in the historical pattern? Undoubtedly the present proportion of immigrants (about 5% of the total population) is far greater than earlier proportions, particularly in London, which contains about half the total immigrants.
And undoubtedly there is today an unprecedented economic need for immigrants, at a time when the birth rate of white Britons has declined dramatically, many young whites are tragically unqualified and unmotivated, and the ageing population desperately needs productive young workers to support it.
Yet British immigration policy remains as unplanned and accidental as ever, responding to immediate external pressures and crises rather than to any perceived long-term vision. In humanitarian terms it can be defended, though it often appears callous and short-sighted. But in terms of Britain’s future character or economic advantage, it shows little sign of serious thought or foresight.
The more profound question, to which this book provides many clues, is how far the whole concept of Britishness is being undermined by new immigrants. It is particularly difficult to answer among groups like the Bangladeshis, who resist assimilation and interracial mixing.
Undoubtedly Muslim populations present special problems, with their own powerful and separate culture. A Cabinet Office report in 2002 painted a worrying picture of Muslim underachievement. “There was no disguising the extent,” Winder deduces, “to which Britain’s Muslims were lagging on nearly every material indicator.”
The religious divide may be no greater than that which separated Catholic Irish and Protestant Britons in the 19th century; but the relationship with Muslims will provide a serious challenge to British leadership, exacerbated by the fears of terrorism from fundamentalists.
Yet the old concepts of the British character, with specific values and virtues, have already dissolved in the explosion of individualism and materialism in the past two decades. As Winder suggests in an important insight, “When we dwell on the diligent and unpretentious good manners that once typified England – the much-satirised diffidence in the face of queues, courtesy in the face of mishaps, patience in the face of adversity – we need to realise that such traits may be more common now in migrant Britain, with its strong family loyalties and principles of obligation, than in the brash, every-man-for-himself mainstream.” As an ageing Briton, travelling in a crowded bus or tube, I am more likely to be offered a seat by a young black or Asian than by anyone else.
This useful and readable book should provoke many readers to reconsider their picture of Britishness, and to realise how much of our enterprise and tolerance has originated from the interplay with immigrants who were once seen as dangerously foreign.
the hague asia knowledge 