Annual Lecture 2024 – Sunder Katwala asks: ‘Does the history of migration shape its future?’

On Tuesday 12 November, we held our 2024 annual lecture at Merchant Taylors’ Hall in London.

In a thought-provoking speech, Sunder Katwala, Director of the thinktank British Future, asked us to consider: if we engage and educate people about the history of immigration, how much can we hope to change how we talk and think about its future?

Sunder explored the complexities of immigration, touching upon the impact of historical events and his personal story as the child of immigrants, the evolving narratives surrounding migration, and recurring themes of control, contribution, and compassion. He set out six signposts for how we can engage with the history of immigration to provide a bedrock for more constructive conversations about the future.

The lecture was chaired by journalist and author Rafael Behr.

Listen to the lecture or scroll down to read the transcript:

Photos: Elzbieta Piekacz
Audio recording: Bill Bingham
Thanks to: The Eastern City Bid for generously sponsoring the event and to the Merchant Taylors’ Company for hosting the event in their stunning hall.

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Transcript:
The Migration Museum Annual Lecture 2024: Does the History of Migration Shape its Future?
Sunder Katwala

Thank you for the invitation to give the Migration Museum’s Lecture tonight. The Migration Museum is an important project, because this subject – the history of migration – matters.

Immigration is among the most contested issues in our democracies today. We saw that in Britain’s General Election in July, and again in America’s Presidential Election last week. Reactions to this summer’s riots – their causes and consequences – often reflected contested arguments about immigration, too.

In speaking to you tonight about this topic, I am not myself a migrant to Britain. I have always lived in the country of my birth. But I would not be here without immigration.

Though I was born in the Doncaster Royal Infirmary in Yorkshire, my father was born four thousand miles away in Gujarat, India. He was born a British subject too. India would not become Independent until he was three or four.

Having trained as a doctor, in his twenties, Dad took the plane from India to England. Immigration was the most hotly contested political issue of that time. In fact, Dad flew into Heathrow airport in April 1968 in the week after Enoch Powell had given the most famous – and the most infamous – British speech about immigration of the last century.

It was a speech about why Dad should not have come. Though he had not heard anything about Enoch’s speech before he had left India, it was dominating the news headlines after he arrived in London.

Its key point was how important it was for this country’s future that he should be encouraged to leave – along with several hundred thousand other Commonwealth migrants who had come in the previous two decades.

To be honest, Dad was not sure that he would want to stay either.

In his case, Powell had an unusual ally. My grandfather, back in Baroda, wanted Dad to go back too – and was putting together his own repatriation package. He would help him to set up a surgery – and was offering to arrange a very suitable marriage for him too.

Yet the history of immigration is partly a story of unintended consequences.

Working in Surrey as a doctor, my Dad had met my Mum, who had come from County Cork in Ireland to train as a nurse. She still recalls how the ticket inspector on the ferry to Holyhead had noticed her one-way ticket: “So, you’re coming as an immigrant then, are you?”, he asked. It did not sound an entirely friendly inquiry.

This was turning into bad news for Enoch Powell. For what Powell had seen as the truly existential risk to Britain was less that posed by my Dad – or the other Commonwealth migrants themselves.

What he feared most were the social consequences if they had children here: “Sometimes people point to the increasing proportion of immigrant offspring born in this country as if the fact contained within itself the ultimate solution,” Powell noted.

But he could not have disagreed more. “The truth is the opposite”, he argued. “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a West Indian or an Asian still. Unless he be one of the small minority, he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one”.

Powell said his warning was urgent – because, “time is running against us and them […] With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the United States”.

Enoch Powell had never been a fan of America, as that passage suggests. He spoke in Birmingham in April 1968, just a couple of weeks after the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. Maybe the ghost of Enoch Powell, if he is listening in to all of this, might, even now, claim some vindication from the deeply polarised arguments in what will after January’s Presidential inauguration be Donald Trump’s America once again.

So Powell could not see in the British-born children of migrants any positive potential for the solution of integration but only a deep, ultimately irreconcilable tragedy.

Yet the upshot was – spoiler alert here – that I was, in fact, born, whatever Powell might have thought about that. He probably did not hear the news directly – but we can safely say that he would not have thought it cause for celebration.

Metaphorically, my birth was – like tens of thousands like it – for him, just one more stick on the funeral pyre of the very suicide of this nation itself.

Now, my view is that Powell was wrong about me. But, you know, I would say that, wouldn’t I? I am somewhat biased on this point – and probably am bound to take this side of the argument.

But I think that Powell was wrong not just about me, but about us – the British, the people we are today. He was too pessimistic about Britain in asserting the difficulty, improbability and likely impossibility of the children of Commonwealth migrants ever feeling properly British or being recognised as such by others – and all of the devastating consequences which he feared might flow from that.

That Powell speech is part of Britain’s history of immigration now.

On some days, we may feel we have come a long way. I have little doubt that arriving in Britain right in the middle of that tumult is one reason why my Dad felt quite emotional at seeing Rishi Sunak stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street as the Prime Minister of this country a couple of years ago – even if my teenage children were less sure why that might seem like a big deal.

On other days – such as during the riots last summer – the echoes of the arguments in how we talk about immigration means that people reasonably wonder how much has ever really changed at all.

These polarised public arguments about immigration present a central challenge for our topic tonight: If we engage and educate people about the history of immigration, how much could we really expect or hope to change about how we talk and think about its future?

How far would we want to judge the success of a Migration Museum by whether or not it proves willing or able to supply more and better ammunition for those in the trenches of the political, media and social media debates about immigration?

Some of you may think it would be a very good thing if it could.  But shifting the media discourse, political narratives or transforming public attitudes may set an unrealistically high bar. And that may not quite be what a museum is for anyway.

So I will try to make a more modest proposal about what we might achieve from how we think, talk and engage about the history of immigration. Doing so will not settle the public arguments about immigration – but it can help to establish more common ground on the story of how we got there.

Let me try to set out six signposts for how we might set about trying to do that.

My first signpost: the story of migration to Britain should be more than the quest for a counter-narrative.

The most vocal arguments against immigration have a common refrain: too many, too much, too fast.

Yet the question is rarely just about numbers and the pace of change.

What makes this an existential question is the arrival of people who are not like us – especially those who we cannot quite imagine ever wanting to become part of us.

That is where the language of invasion, infusion and even infestation comes from – a society transformed, spoiled and ruined by being “swamped” or “flooded” by migrants.

One response is to reach for a counter-narrative: recasting Britain’s history as a country of migration – welcoming successive “waves” of immigration across different centuries: from the Huguenots, the Jews and the Irish, the African-Caribbeans and South Asians, to the Poles, Romanians, Hong Kongers and others beyond.

We may not notice that this ritual exchange of narratives and counter-narratives – and they are both about a society transformed by immigration – even extends to trading shared metaphors: countering water with water, perhaps unwittingly, responding to devastating floods with happy waves of migration washing over us instead.

Despite its benign intent, this exchange of contrasting worldviews is unlikely to do much to humanise the story of migration to Britain. One of the least engaging or effective things to say about the history of immigration would be to convey something like: we’ve always had immigration, get over it.

Rather than deploying a simple counter-narrative to amplify one side of a polarised political argument, could we try to find more common ground about the history of migration?

Signpost two: We need a British story of immigration for everybody – not just about and for those whose families came to Britain.

My family story as the child of migrants to Britain is not unusual. Many of you will have your own versions of it in your own family histories.

Ten million people in this country – one in six of the population – were, like my Mum and Dad, born abroad, including those who had arrived in the last decade, or across the generations.

About a third of people are the children or grandchildren of migrants to this country.

Yet that leaves something like half of the population of England who have four grandparents from inside England itself, without crossing borders within Britain.

I would say that we cannot understand the story of who we are today without understanding the role of migration. Yet that might be more intuitively obvious to some of us than others.

How could we tell Britain’s story of migration to maximise the chances of it resonating across both groups – not just primarily those of recent migrant descent.

I doubt the way to achieve this would be to declare that we were all immigrants once or that we are all immigrants, once you go back far enough.

I would discard entirely the inaccurate language sometimes used to call people like me “second generation immigrants” – which tends to be used selectively, only for those of visible minority backgrounds.

So I doubt that trying to invent the idea of fourth, fifth, sixth and tenth generation migrants to Britain could work.

There is a significant intuitive difference when a family history of migration is within living memory – involving a parent or grandparent – that becomes more abstract, distant and theoretical if stretching back much further on the family tree.

I prefer an alternative language of first, second and third generation Britons. That seems to me a much more inclusive approach – which could create more of a bridging link to those who can trace their ancestors back a thousand years or more.

To understand the story of immigration in the making of modern Britain, it needs to be more than the story of those who came to Britain – and about the people and places that they joined too.

That is a story of the welcomers as well as the unwelcoming in the local stories of Liverpool and Bristol, Glasgow and Manchester, Belfast and London. It is the story of institutions too – the armies that fought the World Wars, how the Monarchy and modern sport, as much as the NHS, exemplify the stories of immigration, contact and integration that have helped make our society what it is today.

Signpost three:  Britain is not America – so an American template of the story of immigration will be a poor fit for Britain.

America has a Migration Museum at Ellis Island – the gateway through which 12 million new migrants came to America from the 1890s to the 1920s. It closed as an immigration processing centre in the 1950s but has been recreated since the 1990s as a new museum of migration. Millions of Americans have visited it. Many have contributed their family stories of becoming American, often linked to the site.

America’s national identity was shaped by its narrative as a “nation of immigrants” captured by that famous exhortation on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Of course, the stark contrast between America’s declarations of its founding principles of freedom and black America’s contrasting origins story of unfreedom, – the legacies of slavery and segregation, – have been one deep fissure in America’s story.

But now this next Trump era is set to see a clash as sharp as any in American history between nativist sentiment and the idea of America as a nation of immigrants. The President-elect’s pledge is the largest deportation campaign in American history – seeking to remove up to 15 million people who have made a life in America. Last week’s election captured how a foundational story believed by one half of America no longer speaks to another half.

But Britain is not America – either in our history of migration or our challenges about asylum and immigration today.

In Britain, as in America, the story of immigration, race and our modern diverse society are inextricably linked – and increasingly contested too.

But the arc of British history – the rise and fall of a colonial Empire and the post-Windrush Commonwealth migration that resulted from it – differs from the American pattern.  It has been a story, too, of unintended consequences – in the story of both Commonwealth free movement and European free movement.

It may partly be that the British story of migration seems a messier, more complicated affair. Without similar constitutional declarations of key principles, there has never been an official narrative of the British story in quite the same way.

We will need to join the dots of a different narrative for ourselves.

Signpost four:  The spirit in which we write the missing chapters into our national story matters.

So, we need a national story that can include the voices of everybody who has a stake in it. As we seek to find and tell the stories of migration to Britain, how should we respond to concerns that this may seem to be an exercise in “rewriting history”?

Maybe we could rebut that charge as simply baffling. It seems difficult to find a clear boundary – in principle or in practice – between writing history and rewriting it.  But – especially if seeking a British story of migration that does more than reinforce polarisation, but seeks to reach beyond it – the spirit in which we try to fill missing chapters into the national story matters.

That spirit should be about what we want to add – not about what we are trying to take away.

It would not be an effort to dethrone one imagined dominant narrative and to replace it with a new one.

It should be more about weaving into the tapestry of a national story all the strands and journeys that form part of it.

So, I would be much less interested – 99% of the time – in ideas about which statues might come down. and I would be much keener to put more energy into the unheard stories we might recognise – in new exhibitions, plaques memorials and sometimes even new statues instead.

The Windrush has emerged in recent decades as a symbolic new “origins” moment in post-war Commonwealth migration. It was not the first ship to arrive. But the Pathe News cameras were there in Tilbury – to capture Lord Kitchener’s first rendition of “London is the Place for Me”. That the 1948 British Nationality Act was before parliament at the time, creating a flurry of media and political activity though the act ratified what was already the case, that the passengers for Jamaica were coming as full and equal British citizens, in law and theory at least.

The Windrush story was largely forgotten for four decades – before being rediscovered and retold, through the efforts of the late Sam King for the 40th anniversary in 1988; the major BBC series from Mike and Trevor Phillips ten years later, as well as the work of Windrush campaigners like Patrick Vernon OBE.

Windrush has become part of the common culture in this century, on stage and screen, in Small Island, Paddington and beyond.

The story of Windrush is a large-scale act of voluntary migration from a British colony. The boat was sent to Jamaica to bring RAF men back from temporary leave. “It was an entrepreneurial decision to try to fill the empty berths by offering fares of £28 in the Jamaican newspaper, Then Gleaner. “WELCOME HOME” is the headline on the Evening Standard – because of the RAF servicemen on board.

We can only really understand the Windrush story if we treat it not just as a new beginning – but rather a new chapter in much longer stories.

Yet only a third of people know about the black British contribution to the world wars: one of the foundations – the war to Windrush story – remains unfamiliar to most.

The Windrush scandal of 2018 changed the meaning of Windrush again. A lack of knowledge among decision-makers about the history of Commonwealth migration was a major cause of the injustice done to those whose status was not understood or recognised, as Wendy Williams review of the lessons found.

This was a scandal caused by a lack of understanding of history – yet our shifting narratives about the past did shape the belated effort to remedy those injustices too.

The Windrush Scandal could be called the 1971 Immigration Act scandal. After all, it was about the consequences of successive governments failing to properly document the status of those who arrived before 1973 when Commonwealth free movement ended.  It was surely the association with the increasingly well-known story of Windrush that helped the scandal finally break through – at the Commonwealth summit, in politics and the media – by animating what the injustice to the Windrush generation had been.

Signpost five: At the core of our story of migration are recurring arguments about control, contribution and compassion.

So, the modern history of immigration is the history of arguments about immigration control. One mythology about the Enoch Powell speech is that – because he was sacked from the frontbench by Ted Heath – politicians were too scared to talk about immigration for decades. That underestimates his influence. His impossible arguments for repatriation were rejected – and he lost his argument against opposing the anti-discrimination laws on race too. But he was influential on immigration policy – reflected in the restrictive policies of the 1971 and 1981 Acts. The history of immigration policy does not go in one direction: there is a cycle of openness and restriction. There is a curious symmetry in the story of Commonwealth free movement ending, and then EU free movement from 1973 until Brexit.

We have a recurring argument about asylum and refugees too.  Do we have a “proud history of protecting refugees” in this country? Up to a point, I would certainly say that we do.

People have been given sanctuary in Britain across each of the last seven decades – from Hungary to Vietnam, Uganda to the Balkans, Syria and Ukraine – giving a new life to hundreds of thousands of people. Yet this is also a mixed record. We respond to the emotive story of the nine thousand children’s lives saved by the Kindertransport without always noticing why it was a Kindertransport: that Britain did not want to take the adults too.

That is why the rights of the postwar Refugee Convention mattered – though their scope remains contested today, as in the general election argument over the last government’s Rwanda plan.

What should we do with this contested history? The academic historian, the museum curator, the culture-maker writing a novel or TV script, or the advocate for refugee rights today each have different roles and responsibilities, different objectives and motives in how they might respond.

One thing we can take from the history is that our response to appeals for protection has been a contested question in every era. Yet asserting that “Britain was terrible to migrants in the past and is still terrible today” hardly seems an argument likely to inspire a more welcoming approach in the future.

Anniversaries like the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention in 2026 offer an important opportunity to engage the public with those stories – and to reflect on how they can inform the choices we want our governments to make today.  Historians can help us to understand the past. I think civic advocates for refugee protection should continue to argue that we can take pride in what is good in that history – if that can inspire the spirit in which we choose to act today.

Signpost six: Though it cannot settle every question we face, the history of migration can give us the foundations we need.

The history of migration has been about choices – the choices that individuals make to move – to study or to work, for relationships and family, to seek safety or new opportunities. And it is about the choices that governments make – to facilitate, to welcome or to impede those choices – and the democratic arguments about how to shape those choices too.

So the history of immigration cannot determine its future. That will depend on the choices that we make now.  A Migration Museum is not a Migration Advisory Committee. More understanding and confidence about the history of immigration will not tell us much about what a government might consider that the optimal level of immigration might be by the end of this parliament. Nor would it offer much guidance about how to weigh up the pros and cons of EU free movement if we were to be back in the single market against a post-Brexit system applying similar rules to those coming from Europe, the Commonwealth and the rest of the world.

But the history of immigration has settled perhaps the most important question.  The foundational questions raised by immigration are not really “how many” – or who to let in to maximise the contribution of migrants in our economy, NHS or care homes – so that “they” are good for “us”. What our history of immigration has settled is the existential question – of whether migrants and their children can become us.

That appeal to history may well be insufficient unless we are also putting effort into the practical pressures of handling change fairly – of how we make it work today both for those who come to Britain and the communities that they join.

But if we use the history well, it could help us to live well together and embrace a changing idea of “us”, in which everybody’s voice can be heard.

We can continue to contest that history – to debate competing narratives and ideas about the meaning of Windrush and post-war immigration, and more recent choices too. We can scrutinise, debate and learn lessons from the past – both what we have got right in the long-run, and what we could have done differently.  What is legitimately contested today is the future of immigration, not its past.

What cannot in the 2020s be legitimately contested is the settled fact of the immigration of 1948 or 1968 – or indeed 2004.

Even Powell ultimately understood that the birth of the next generation here in Britain – like me – would settle fundamental questions. We cannot know today what Powell’s ghost would have made of the Conservative Party electing Kemi Badenoch as its latest leader. Nor can we necessarily predict what her own experience of being born in Britain before returning to Britain as a 16-year-old, seeing herself as a first-generation migrant, will mean for her own voice in the immigration debates to come.

But the history of immigration matters. It helps explain who we are today – and how our society got here. If we do not place excessive expectations on what the history of migration can do for us, it can help to provide a bedrock confidence which can be one foundation for more constructive conversations about the future of immigration too.