ABSTRACT
Over the two decades preceding the enactment of the Aliens Bill the immigration question erupted intermittently within debates on social policy. The form of its appearance was subject to alterations, however, changes that reflected the shifting meanings with which London and the East End were endowed. In the first ten years the immigration question was driven by a mixture of apprehension and compassion among the propertied classes in the face of the capital’s outcast masses. Some trade unionists also turned anti-alien, particularly in the face of the defeats of new unionism and the breakdown of labour organization among the immigrant workers. Accordingly, Jewish immigrants and their impact upon the surrounding native-born population provided one focus for investigations into public health, sweated labour, and
poverty in the capital. As J. A. Hobson pointed out in 1891, the prospects for an Aliens Act depended upon ‘the success of other schemes for treating the supply of low-skilled labour’.4 By contrast, after the turn of the century, when immigration again became a subject for social investigation and political agitation, the emphasis of debate had shifted from the domestic to the imperial consequences of poverty. The arrival of thousands of Russian Jews annually, who were represented as physically enfeebled, without marketable trades, and possessing a ‘low standard of life’, reacted upon fears of Britain’s imminent international decline. The more so since these degraded migrants congregated at the very heart of the empire and were seen to have a deteriorating effect upon the indigenous working classes there.5 The shape of the anxieties excited by Jewish immigration thus reflected a shift in the fears projected upon London and the East End. The capital ceased to be seen as the most likely site of any breakdown in the body politic. Now it had become the diseased heart of an imperial organism threatened by potential attacks from rival powers.
