Migration: A Historical Perspective - Professor Sir Richard Evans

Richard Evans I'm the Provost agression College and I'm delighted to see you all here tonight I thought I would talk about a matter of current concern in a very broad historical context focusing particularly on Europe but also looking at some other areas as well not that broad not over the whole of the of history as it were but particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries so we can actually put the problem which of immigration which concerns so many people in this country into some kind of perspective and in particular maybe that's the function of history to realize that it's not all all that new now of course at the moment we're in and have been for the last few years in a major crisis caused by the influx of millions of migrants refugees and asylum seekers mainly from the Middle East but also from parts of North Africa into Europe the numbers have reached large proportions in the last few years people are being driven to leave their homes by civil conflict above all in Syria where an estimated quarter of a million people have died since the beginning of the war between the Assad regime and the various forces burst of democratic renewal then of Islamist extremism which have opposed it the similar conditions have existed in Iraq and Libya pushing more people out and Afghanistan parts of North Africa political violence economic deprivation have fueled the mass movement of people to Europe some idea of the latest figures I could get here the the key thing is to look really at the the bottom which shows you see that there's those graphs there of the massive increase in numbers in from 2013 really since these civil conflicts began and that's where they've been going to Greece Italy Spain they've been coming from and and turkey of course but that's not Europe so that's not on this this table they've been coming a bubble from Syria because of course of the massive war there from Afghanistan for similar reasons of instability and civil conflicts Iraq and then Eritrea Pakistan Nigeria Somalia Sudan all of these areas beset by by conflict violence and ensuing deprivation and hunger huge numbers are coming by sea as you saw there in that table often under difficult and dangerous conditions and a large number of died on the journey many others hundreds of thousands have suffered major hardship including malnutrition disease violence and rape in overcrowded boats coming particularly from North Africa as you can see they're very very dangerous European countries have begun to close their borders and the European Union's plan to distribute refugees by quotas of course Member States has been resisted by some a scheme to limit the number of refugees by returning them to camps in Turkey has met with some success refugees have begun to return to Syria as Isis is slowly driven back it's worth pointing out I think that this migration crisis is not just European day I will be talking mostly about Europe nor as a problem just a recent one since world war two new special e since the 1980s wars and conflicts have led to large numbers of refugees high figures reflecting not least headlong population growth in the third world so you can see that a massive growth from the 1980s some fluctuations major events there before that nineteen the Second World War come on to talk about that India and so on up to the recent and continuing refugee crisis Pakistan was a major destination for refugees in the global context mostly fleeing from conflict in Afghanistan the mass migration of people fleeing from economic disaster famine conflict violence in their own countries is not merely a European problem and of course the the collapse of the state the collapse of the ending of the states guarantee to give its people a life often because of civil wars and civil conflicts is linked very closely to famine and to deprivation and then to migration but I'm going to concentrate as I said on Europe and try and put this crisis into historical perspective let's remind ourselves to begin with that large-scale migrations not new in the modern history of Europe but it's going is migration in the other direction so not into Europe but out of Europe this is the greatest international migration in history in terms of numbers it occurred in the nineteenth century as millions of Europeans made their way to other parts of the globe small number of them after the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the 1863 Polish uprising against Russia for political reasons but most of them just to seek a better life and better economic prospects overseas so the original economic migrants are going out of Europe to particularly to North and South America and also to Australia and New Zealand and so on they're not coming into Europe this is these other major it's a bit fuzzy I'm afraid but there's that those are the major sources of immigration that say people leaving Europe in these two periods 1871 the 1870s and 80s and 1890s and 1900s it's the leer of American freedom the chance of acquiring land cheaply and farming it first of all for subsistence and then a profit irresistible for many whose future in Europe seemed without perspective and the extension of the British Empire in Canada Australia New Zealand the achievements of independence by Latin American countries in the 1820s also pulled Europeans overseas most spectacular exodus was from Ireland between 1848 in 1855 very short period of time the islands population fell from eight and a half to six million much of the decline of the beginning of the period of course was because of the terrible famine caused by potato blight and more generally repeated failures of harvests and the hungry for teas as they were called and by the indifference and prejudice of the British authorities but the continuing fall to under five million by the census of 1921 it's almost entirely due to emigration as this cartoon shows carried out very much against the wish of the British there's the British lion looking really sad at losing all these Irish people of course the Americans portrayed a very favorable picture of life in in the USA and John bull fails really to to keep Catherine oohoo lien and all the all the Irish in the British Isles remember that time Ireland is part of the United Kingdom the bulk of the migrants went to the USA more than three million in all between 1848 and 1921 by 1900 there's more Irish born men and women living in the USA than in Ireland itself but if this is the most famous example of migration through starvation and famine to a better lie overseas it's not the only one I do a brief kind of tour Dozo of other migrations in 19th century Europe for example between 1846 and 1857 so just over a decade over a million people left Germany in the wake of the potato crisis you okay USA also became more attractive after 1862 with the passage through Congress of the homeland Act which allowed settlers to fence off land for farming in the Midwest little or no cost news of this soon reached Europe another million people left Germany between 1864 and 73 as the world economy recovered from the crisis of the late 70s a fresh wave emigrated another a 1.8 million left Germany by 1890 this time mostly from the impoverished northeast in fact numerically speaking the Germans were the largest single group of immigrants into the USA this period a largest single group of people now in the USA are not of British descent they're actually of German descent as well the similar in in Scandinavia Norwegian emigration in fact was higher as a proportion of the domestic population in the nineteenth century then that of Britain and Ireland 971 per 100,000 Norwegians left in the 1880s compared to 608 at the height of the Irish immigration in the 60s posture Hungary is very similar the over a million people left has again part from 1900 to 1914 there you've got the different countries that rather sort of cliche written images of people Great Britain the cloth cap making clear it's working closing emigration the Irish the Italians looking a bit like a bandit there and Germany is the tallest one and the kind of traditional Bavarian sort of sort of dress but there's plenty more and of course some of these the the rate depends on the size of the population so no way I have a small population but a lot of a large proportion of left and there's Russian emigration which began with the Jews fleeing pogroms initiated after the assassination of his own alexander ii and aged 81 though chooser and know we're responsible for it showed him this is a mixture of political and economic motives more than ten thousand people mostly Jewish left every year with a total of nearly 800,000 in the 1880s 1.6 million in each of the following decades and then the last wave of European immigration because emigration to the Americas came in from southern Italy where there's enormous poverty even after the turn of the turn of the century and trapped in this cycle of backwardness huge numbers 18 873,000 Italians immigrated in 1913 about 1.8 percentage of the population of Italy left between 1900 and 1913 the classic origins if you remember the movie The Godfather of course that the Godfather - I think shows the emigration of Marlon the character played by Marlon Brando's his father in the 1919 in the early 1900s worth remembering that with far steamships guaranteeing a quick passage long as he didn't travel on the Titanic about 40 percent of these came back between 1897 and 1906 about one and a half million Italians however emigrated permanently in the first decade essentially almost no part of Europe's exempt nearly six of the entire population of Greece emigrated between 1890 and 1914 about 60 million people altogether left Europe between 1815 and 1914 roughly 34 million to the USA 4 million to Canada millions Australia and New Zealand between 1857 and 1940s the only figure I could get 7 million Europeans left Argentina and between 1921 and 1945 5 million for Brazil so this is an enormous enormous scale of migration now the effects of this mass migration on other parts of the world could be devastating boost it gave to economies like those of the USA and Australia and this was a tremendous boost but it was an expense of the indigenous populations here's an 1872 famous painting by John ghast called American Progress now there you have this is the idea of manifest destiny they have Columbia symbolic figure representing America carrying I think the Constitution as accompanied by Hardy pioneers at the bottom right there and stagecoaches while she's pulling telegraph wires laying them across the Midwest and is followed at a distance by by railways that great symbol of 19th century civilization all of them heading towards the Rockies from the top left of the picture but you will notice the bottom left-hand corner half-naked Native Americans are being pushed into the outer darkness along with the Bison on which they depended and their population plummeted as Europeans streamed across the plains fence the men began farming and drove the drove the Native Americans out of the out of the Midwest there's a very rough crude estimate of the decline of the Native American population in North America from 5 million down to just a few hundred thousand teen between the arrival of the Europeans and the turn of the century Europeans introduced diseases above all mostly accidentally in a few cases deliberately like smallpox to which Native Americans or Australians for that matter had not been exposed and the switch there had no immunity even the common cold was was fatal - previously on exposed native populations and of course populations were driven off their open land as it was fenced in into increasingly poor and unsustainable reservations driven off partly by troops and by by armies and by of course legislation introduced to deprive them of their of their land here's a map of sessions of of India populations as Indian Native American populations over the previously vast areas are forced so forcibly taken away from the Native Americans and then of course the establishment of new European colonial empires from the famous Scramble for Africa in the 1880s to the First World War added state-sponsored genocide to the factors reducing native populations most notably in German Southwest Africa now Namibia and the Belgian Congo superior weaponry greater numbers led to the defeat of native states though in some areas notably New Zealand where the Maori were well organized and supplied and the state of Ashanti in West Africa which took a long series of wars to subdue native populations if they were well-organized and had an effective Staton and sophisticated military tactics they were able to resist with some success situation changed after the end of World War one growing restrictions on immigration into America the rise of nativism anti-immigrant sentiment produced a drastic reduction in the numbers of Europeans leaving for other parts of the world this didn't mean an end to migration but it meant very broadly a change in its nature from this point onwards for almost a century most migration within Europe was forced it wasn't voluntary and it was overwhelmingly caused by what came in the 1990s to be known as ethnic cleansing I want to turn down the second part of this lecture to look at the history of what's been called ethnic cleansing a very unpleasant phrase it means the forcible removal of populations within Europe against their will and it began in Europe with a Balkan Wars which raged from 1911 through to the first world war as the Ottoman Empire the Turkish Muslim Ottoman Empire collapsed smaller states like Serbia Greece Montenegro Bulgaria fought to increase their territories so this led to mass expulsion 100,000 Turks and the expelled by an alliance of Balkan states before 1914 there the unfortunate Turks trotting back to to Turkey 100,000 30,000 Bulgarians were expelled from Macedonia to Bulgaria a hundred thousand Greeks from Bulgaria to Greece 49,000 ethnic Turks exchanged for 47,000 everything Bulgarians and a population transfers agreed between between governments didn't meant mean to say at all that it was not violent it certainly was and this then became a bigger issue after the war the victorious powers Western powers decided to reward Greece for backing the Magna expense the Ottoman Empire which had been on the side of Germany Young Turk nationalists had taken over the Empire and organized armed resistance as the conflict flared each side began to expel members of the other group defined particularly by religious characters adherence Christian or Muslim sorry this is in French against the only one I could find are you conceived as the arrows all of these mass mass in forced migrations or exchanges between particularly the autumn autumn and power turkey on the right-hand side there and sort of orange Bulgaria and Greece about one and a half million Greeks are forced out of Turkey often with a lot of violence the precedent for this already existed in the forcible expulsion of Christian Armenians from Anatolia during the war violence exercised by the Ottoman Empire the young turks in particular escalated until it became the genocide of over a million Armenians but on the other hand half a million Muslims are expelled by force from Greece during the post-war turmoil two governments ratified these explosions retrospectively in 1923 and a further population exchange was agreed involving 200,000 Greeks and 360,000 Turks it's a lot of this is an ominous precedent and there's a lot of migration then following on that or not again not of a voluntary type but though it was not it was not enforced certainly not by international agreements between the wars left-wing liberal socialists communists people and Jews left Germany and Austria again communists socialists left Spain after the ordering and after the Civil War Italy again there was some political migration from from there but it was on a scene in this larger context it was on a relatively small scale what caused migration mostly forced to grow massively again was World War two let's look at first of all at Yugoslavia the composite state made up of of Selenia Serbia Croatia Montenegro and and and other parts of the Balkans the Germans conquered Croatia and these areas and declared a Croat client state under the fascist Anton her public to go over Bosnia has a governor and all the territories inhabited by currents here's the enormous size of the German puppet state of Croatia during the war and published began a campaign of it of ethnic cleansing of these areas he drove out two million Serbs who are in a new state he is he defined collapses Aryan as the Nazi Germans like to say and then deprived all non-aryans of their rights as mass murder committed by the fascist crow out to starsha militias against Serbs on enormous scale and perhaps 300,000 maybe 400,000 serbs who were murdered if you want the reason for the bitterness and the Balkan wars of the 1990s you have to know look no further than these conflicts in world war two about a hundred and eighty thousand Serbs fled Croatia - to Serbia meanwhile about thirty thousand Jews were killed by the coast most of the gypsies often under very horrendous circumstances and Hitler's ally Hungary expelled Serbs as well but garrier 260 1000 Bulgarians are forcibly exchanged for a hundred thousand remains there's a lot of a lot of explosions going on but much bigger in scale was the plan that the Nazis had for the reordering of German and European populations during the war who now remembers the Armenians Hitler's said to remark to his generals as he ordered them to exterminate not the Jews but the poles and their culture at the beginning just before the beginning of the war this violence against what the Nazis called Slavic populations grew in scale until the general plan for the East official Nazi policy from 1942 proposed the extermination ba disease and starvation deliberately caused of between 30 million and 45 million Slavs to make way with German settlers after the war had been won this would have been had it been carried out the largest genocide by some way in in European indeed in world history there the brown area you can see is the represents the ambition for the German dominated area of Europe stretching way up there on the top right into Eastern Europe and from all of this area the idea was that Germans would be dominant it derived from a deep Darwinian conviction that all wars were racial wars and that Germany and the Germans were destined to rule Europe and the world but these weren't the this is fortunately never realized some 300 third million Russian Soviet prisoners of war from the Red Army were deliberately killed by the Nazis who just and the German army indeed who just pinned them into huge enclosures on the steppe and left them to die of starvation and disease and that's in a way the beginning of this there are many hundreds of thousands of others were were killed by the Germans but it never actually got as far as implementing the plan in anything like its full extent it's not the only population transfer extermination brutal forced migration during the war if we turn to Stalin Stalin and the Soviet Union imposed a social revolution in the style of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the following years in areas that his forces invaded by forcibly removing counter revolutionary social groups as he thought them as Polish land owning Klaus one-and-a-half million poles were deported from the the eastern part of Poland occupied the RET by the Red Army in nineteen nineteen thirty-nine some 350,000 died including thousands of Polish officers perhaps fourteen thousand shot in the woods at Katyn two hundred thousand people were deported from the Baltic republics when they're occupied in 1939 about 10% of the population many sent to labor camps 400,000 Romanians were deported by Stalin from Moldova the idea is not this is not kind of genocide the idea is not to exterminate the poles or likeness of Romania's but to remove anyone who Stallion thought might be an obstacle to the imposition of Stalinist of communist rule and from 1941 onwards why the Germans invaded the Soviet Union Stalin deported groups he thought posed a possible threat to Soviet security by allowing themselves to the invading Germans as ethnic Germans obviously especially from the Volga Crimean Tatars Bulgarians Armenians about two million people an unknown number died in the harsh conditions of deportation Finn's poles Germans even 172,000 Koreans were deported from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that's before the war during the war million ethnic Germans were deported from the Volga and 300,000 polled many more so if he claims he's not quite the the term for this but certainly some of the areas were settled by other ethnic groups it's more a kind of social engineering and military precaution of one should say very exaggerated kind under Stalin's eventual successor was shot these deportations were mostly reversed the survivors were allowed back Khrushchev denounced the deportations as inhumane but that's not the end of it there's also a massive deportation that went on in East Central Europe at the end of the war and for some time afterwards in the second world war about 11 million people all of them ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe but they'd already fled was stopped from coming back German settlements were scattered all over East Central Europe they'd been strengthened of course by Nazi colonization but many of these families had lived in the region for centuries and now they're expelled by the reestablish nations Poland Czechoslovakia Romania Yugoslavia other countries long lines of them trudged towards Germany with the weak succumbing to hypothermia and malnutrition and these explosions weren't mass acts of revenge carried out by peoples of Eastern Europe had suffered under the Nazis that played a part of it actually they were ordered by the Allies by Britain and the USA they were planned long before the war became to an end during the Second World War the Czechoslovak leader in exile edad Benesh convinced the Western Allies that the continued presence of a large German minority in Czechoslovakia would saddle the state with a million or more what he called young incorrigible Nazis who destabilize the state national minorities are always in a central Europe especially he said a real thorn in the side of individual nations this is especially true if they are German minorities and by mid 1942 the British government had formally accepted the principle of the transfer of german-speaking minorities out of Eastern Europe who thought that their existence there had been a major factor in destabilizing the region as they were suborned by Hitler before the war and to prevent this from happening again should simply be kicked out and it also became clear before the end of the war that Stalin would hang on to the territory in eastern Poland he annexed in 1939 under the terms of the nazi-soviet pact as the Germans invaded from the West the Soviet Union our were invaded from the east he's going to hang on to this there's no alternative to compensating the post-war Polish state with new territories further to the west in Silesia and up to the rivers order and nicer that in fact had been part of Prussia later Germany for decades or even centuries so Poland as it were moves westward so parts of you can see that long sort of yellow bit there is land annexed from Germany by an international agreement to give more territory to Poland to compensate for the charity loss to the Soviet Union the East Red Army was an occupation Stalin held the trump cards he expelled 1.8 million ethnic poles from eastern Poland and there are annexed by the Soviet Union there arrived in the west of the country prompted the Polish expulsion of ethnic Germans whose homes these people he expelled poles occupied half a million ethnic Ukrainians were sent to the Soviet Union from Poland and more were expelled for more policy exchanges all the Allies could do was to call for population transfers to be conducted and what they called an orderly and humane manner but in fact they were not at all nobody's sure how many ethnic Germans died in these explosions they may have been a million that may been half a million it's certainly very so great was the economic boom and so-called economic miracle in West Germany in the 1950s that means 11 million or so ex-police and refugees were absorbed into the West poem German population with astonishing speed now during the Cold War the division of Europe in the two armed camps ethnic conflicts were largely suppressed particularly by the authoritarian regime of marshal Tito and the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia she'd been found at the end of the first world war but in 1989-90 the collapse of the Soviet Union the end of its suzerainty over Eastern Europe remove the threat threat of Soviet invasion that had kept the Yugoslav national ''tis together under tutors rule which was distinctly different from the Soviet rule and somewhat more liberal in its economic and other policies so Slovenia declared independence in 1990 said Croatia their Macedonia and this point the Serbian Yugoslavia slobbered Amazon Milosevic abandoned the idea of trying to keep you alive of going and opted instead for the creation of a new large Serbian state Serbian nationalism was based from the beginning on a historical concept of Greater Serbia Croatia's independence was seen in Belgrade as a challenge with the announcement of Croatian independence the Yugoslav National Army's a Serbian army basically invaded or began to bombard areas of Croatia inhabited mainly by Serbs the historic city of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast was shelled and the border town of Vukovar was destroyed Serbian forces took control of a central Croatia so that map of the big Croatia during the Second World War was now being replaced by a very different map of a big Serbia war came to an end broken by international agreement ultimately because both sides saw a greater prize at stake which was Bosnia Herzegovina also declared independence in 1991 no clear boundaries in this area between different ethnic groups in particular in Bosnia Herzegovina and see it's a fantastic jumble of Serbs Croats Muslims Muslims because this had been under the Ottoman Empire for many century have been a lot of conversions of particular social groups so that you can't draw a line but you this is where Serbs end and cuts again ethnic divisions here of course are reinforced or overlaid by religious divisions you've got Catholic Croats Orthodox Serbs and the Muslims from 1992 to 1994 TSA's led by Rudkin logic carried out a deliberate program of what was now officially called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia trying to drive out the Muslim population Serbia forcibly expelled over a million thousand Bosnian Muslims and Croats 90% of the atrocities in the war was perpetrated by Serb forces but Croatian forces joined in in the area's kirusha claims again against Muslims and Serbs in 1993 to four Kureishi expelled tens of thousands of bosnian muslims for the region acclaimed the most notorious atrocity was the massacre in 1995 by serb forces of 8,000 bosnian men in the town of stripper nietzsche but there's many many other examples and the site of bosnian muslim prisoners in the serb around our moscow camp aroused worldwide condemnation this famous or notorious secretly taken photograph well the config ended in 1995 the NATO bombing of Belgrade what the serves to a to the negotiating table and the coax took the opportunity to win back the territory they'd lost in 1991 to to expelling 200,000 Serbs what together 140,000 people died in the conflict which flared up again in the end of the decade in in Kosovo claimed by Serbia from largely historical reasons but inhabited mostly by Albanian speakers the Serbs began in the nineteen nine his early nineties a campaign to eradicate Albania and Kosovo an identity an irregular resistance movement was formed by the Kosovo Albanians reaching a height in 1998 when a serb massacre of 60 Kosovar Albanians including women and children attracted international condemnation in 38,000 missions NATO planes aimed to drive the Serbs from Kosovo and precious Serbia into after all again by bombing Belgrade the result immediately was a massive campaign of forced migration in which Serb forces drove up to a million Kosovar Albanians from the province refugees claimed torture and murder by the Serb forces but the campaign failed their NATO forced the lhasa village to come to terms in 1999 Kosovo was placed under UN control in 2008 declared independence still not recognised today by many countries most of the refugees returned but now the cost of our billions began their own campaign of ethnic cleansing which reached the height in 2004 altogether a quarter of a million Serbs were driven from Kosovo in the years after the war so the breakup of the former Yugoslavia taken over a decade of violence to achieve involving forced population transfers on quite a scale and ending not much more than a decade ago so this marked I think then the end of the era of ethnic cleansing and forced migration that had begun in Europe nearly a century before and it's moved on now to the the third and last part of my lecture this this change between from ethnic cleansing called forced migration expulsion Massacre genocide to a different kind of migration that is to say voluntary migration now in fact voluntary migration has been happening on a large scale for many decades since the ninth century in fact industrialization brought large numbers of people from the countryside into the towns not just in in within individual states but also across borders around the 1990 century there were no passports hardly any border controls we take Germany as an example between 1850 and 1900 the population of the eastern provinces of Prussia fell by one and a half million partly because of immigration to the United States partly because people were leading for the towns as a poor agricultural region the German occupational census of 1907 showed a half a million foreign workers in Germany already before the first world war from Austria Hungary Poland and Russian Poland and Italy special circumstances I think dictated this increase in foreign workers during the Second World War because the Nazis refused to force women into the factories believing that they were a source of a high birthrate there should be helped to have more children for the right rather than to making making munitions and and helping at the war effort in the direct way there's also massive losses possibly up to 5 million men killed at the Battlefront so 7 million foreign laborers mostly forced laborers were imported into Germany that was then they were then dissipated they became displaced persons at the end of the war and mostly went back to their countries of origin which of course included Italy France Belgium Holland as well as Eastern Europe well now then I mentioned the economic miracle in post-war Germany as the worldwide recovery of the economy as international economic agreements fostered a boom in production the so-called economic miracle and before very long Germany West Germany the larger part of Germany in capitalist or non socialist Germany was experiencing a serious labor shortage I already mentioned was there even before the First World War this brought in a lot of guest workers so-called Gus Tabata in particularly from Turkey became the largest number in the nineteen above all in the nineteen sixties and when I first went to Germany myself in the 1970s I remember seeing large groups of mostly Turkish that sometimes Italian and Spanish or Greek workers hanging around in the evening in the evenings in the railway station waiting for their friends to come by train the numbers declined following the oil crisis of 1973 but not massively it's a sharply there but it's not as sharp as as some other figures so it's it's a relatively small decline and not that great in the turkey in fact in the end Turkey Berlin is the second largest Turkish city in the world in terms of population after Istanbul just a since event in Greece I think it's Melbourne in Australia as a second largest Greek city in terms of population Germany has a low birth rate and aging population a structural shortage of labour this that began in the late nineteenth century and it continues today to need foreign workers to keep the economy going a major reason apart from the political ones why it's being so welcoming to refugees and then of course it's the same period the booming European economy in the 1950s and 60s brought in citizens of the former empires back into the metropolis looking for a better life looking for work France example from North Africa and UK of course in the Indian subcontinent and for the West Indies in the post-war boom and that again came to an end in the 70s with the economic down to at least began to decline and then in 2008 of course there is a sharp downturn in net migration as the balance net migration to balance teen people immigrating to a country and people from it in the country's most effective so there it goes that kind of massive downturn with the economic crisis of of 2008 to the credit crunch the crash whatever you want to call it in Germany the numbers grow because it still has a labor shortage it's not as badly affected as other countries are by the economic crash and of course it brings in substantial numbers of refugees from the Middle East in particular downturns particularly sharp in Spain and Italy because those are two countries which are affected by the body much more affected by the downturn the economic downturn dn't and others in Europe Germany bucked the trend so immigrants are coming here to Germany still from in 2009 10 11 particularly from Greece and Spain as those countries economies decline then the numbers of those going to Germany where they can be employed and earn money with their continuing lien flourishing economy grows very shortly major changes in the pattern of migration within Europe also driven of course by the fall of the Berlin Wall the collapse of communism east of extension of the European Union in the after the turn of the century so the free movement of labor within the EU has drawn substantial numbers of poles into the UK reversing the previous pattern of net migration so you can see they're up to almost up to the turn of the century late the late 90s the rough balance between migration and immigration and immigration but after that then the net migration starts to rise immigration then moves well above immigration its Pawnee that's why I think if insofar as immigration is the key issue in brexit this change in the nature the pattern of migration there's increase net migration from the turn of the century onwards starts to fuel Euroskeptic populism and it remains a much bigger political issue than immigration from the Middle East partly because until the accession of Eastern European states to the EU and Tony Blair's decision not to use the EU s rules to limit their numbers there are fewer immigrants from EU states than from non EU countries so there you can see the gap is closing again in the mode in the last four or five years a lot of three or four I can only get this up to 2014 I'm afraid but you can see there's more of a balance there immigration from the rest of the EU is it's growing and it's almost reaching the levels of non EU immigration people know in the end also that refugees from areas torn by civil strife like Syria Iraq Pakistan Afghanistan Libya Somalia they'll eventually want to go home once political stability has been resorts restored it's worth noting that a high proportion of people who feature in the immigration statistics in addition are not really immigrants at all they are students they are people who come to our world leading universities to study and something that opinion surveys have shown that the great majority of British people actually welcomed rightly or wrongly many British people regard immigration from other European countries as a permanent problem unconnected a short term crisis or study if people are informed about the real scale of migration their hostility towards immigration decreases but it's still the case that this hostility is much greater in the EU than in other European countries fuelled particularly for the rise of what you might call English nationalism perhaps in response to its equivalent in Scotland and this is this nationalism has fueled the movement for brexit it's not true that immigrants take people's jobs or that they come come to the UK to live off benefits so many people who's afforded brexit seem to think that both the truth but it is true that concentrations let's say of Polish migrant laborers in parts of East Anglia and other parts of the country have led to a feeling of cultural alienation among the British in inhabitants of these areas overall the proportion of immigrants in British society is quite low and they got the right one there so there you see formal studies the blue line you've seen some years people coming to study at universities have exceeded the numbers who are come to work are those are the two main groups and it's right I think that almost every member of the cabinet apart from to resume would like to see students taken out of the immigration statistics and certainly universities would absolutely because they are a major source of income for universities and of course once they go back to their own countries they will have close links with Britain and they will tend to use British machinery in British British know-how and sawmill that's their primary relation so it's a vacant nomming economically beneficial now that's the percentage of immigrant foreign-born population 2015 13 point 4 percent in the UK lower than in Sweden lower than in France roughly comparable to Spain sorry lower that in Germany roughly comparable to Spain in France somewhat lower than Ireland you see the movement there again is a great difference between southeastern Europe and and Western Europe but it's 13.4% foreign-born the increase in recent years oh yes yeah has not been very dramatic you here you've got Brits living in other European countries so either you countries so you have to remember it goes both ways this is why this has become such a thorny su and the brexit negotiations because I guess against immigrants from other countries are the EU countries living in the UK and by the way the largest group of people who born in other countries living here are Indian not from other EU countries you've got a million Brits living in in Spain and substantial numbers in in France and in and in Germany so it's a two-way two-way pros not to mention Island of course so it's a two-way process there seems to be the brexit in the end is not mainly a response to immigration many of the highest votes for brexit were in areas where there were very few immigrants reasons of the vote a lot more complicated major part of is just a protest against the country's governing elites by people who in many cases rightly felt they'd been neglected by governments of both political parties and hadn't seen any rise in their living standards for a very long time Tony Blair took them for granted and went for the middle-class vote and then I'll conversely the coalition governments and though the Conservative government's have thought that they couldn't win their support so haven't bothered either they'll always be people now coming to a close there'll always be people looking for work and prosperity in countries other than the ones where they were born this applies as this shows to the British as well as to others those statistics don't often feature in in the debate and a lot of the people in Spain are of course retired people not all of them living on the Costa del crime but a lot of them they're quite legitimately over the last 20 years migrations been sometimes economic as with most European immigrants in the 19th century sometimes political as with a smaller number of them sometimes deliberately created by war as in the 20th century sometimes the conflict the outcome of conflict and civil strife and civil war as fueling I think the refugee crisis of the present century so solving the crisis in the Middle East is very easy to say this but solving the crisis would be always immediately end the refugee problem from the Middle East but the longer term problem of regulating labor migration people migrating for economic reasons I think is still with us and here I think we need to decide what do we want clearly given the dependence of British institutions like the NHS on qualified doctors have not to mention nurses and so on from other parts of the world it's no believe only sense once to put up barriers it'll stop them from coming and the ninety six percent drop in the numbers of nurses coming to the UK from other Union countries since the brexit vote is worrying to say the least blanket across-the-board promises of numerical reductions in immigration say to the tens of thousands are not only unattainable but they can also be deeply damaging and surely some form of discrimination is needed history of migration known to bring this to an end it was an intrinsic part of the history of humanity actually it's how we all got here and these are the students again from other countries non-eu the EU are the green ones so you can see the numbers have been falling in recent years numbers from China have been increasing very substantially and my own College in Cambridge now the Chinese students are the largest single quit well--that's world migration over the whole of history you can you can see that's what it that's what was going on a long time ago in prehistory they all came from Africa of course but off they went over into North and South America and to Asia into many other parts of the world that's our history that's how we got here migration can be damaging as a history of European migration in the 19th century shown in some respects but it can also bring benefits and the task for the future surely lies in managing it so it enriches our society to the benefit of all the migrants themselves thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 13,424

Keywords: gresham college, gresham, lecture, free lecture, gresham lecture, public lecture, free public lecture, free education, education, college, museum of london, Professor Sir Richard Evans, MIGRATION, history, provost, Gresham College Provost, Refugees, refugee, migrants, economic migrants, Europe, Spain, Greece, Italy, India, pakistan, bangladesh, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, turkey, north africa, Africa, emigrants, immigration, emigration, America, USA, indian cessions, independent state of croatia, serbia, Hungary

Id: qwzpmD4uOBo

Length: 55min 17sec (3317 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2017