ABSTRACT
Anyone reading this book can be left in no doubt as to the impact recent immigration has made on the early 21st century landscape of London. The capital has a long tradition of migrant arrival and settlement and the past few decades have seen dramatic changes in the sources, flows, volume and diversity of incomers. Historians writing about the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, have described the consecutive ‘floods’ and ‘waves’ of immigrants that entered the country from Europe and the New Commonwealth, many settling in the capital. However, by the end of the 1980s with the slowdown of immigration from South East Asia and the Caribbean, there were those who believed that large scale migrant entry was becoming a thing of the past; few anticipated the tsunami of immigrants that would arrive in the United Kingdom in the first decades of the 21st century. In addition to those seeking refuge from political and religious persecution and civil wars in the Middle East and Africa and those reuniting with family already settled in the UK, were incomers from Eastern Europe. People living in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria were awakening to the possibilities that life offered in Western Europe and, in particular, the UK. However, the inflow did not just begin with the Accessions of 2004 and 2007, for as Michał Garapich so rightly points out in his chapter, significant numbers of Polish migrants were seeking economic opportunity in the UK’s ‘promised land’ well before 2004. When concerns were raised about what the Accessions might mean in the case of numbers, government forecasters calmed nerves by suggesting that Accession would bring at most, some 15,000 new Eastern Europe EU citizens each year (Migrant Watch, 2015). How wrong they were. Between May 2004 and June 2006 the government approved just over 427,095 work registration applications from new EU Eastern Europeans; more than half of these from Poland, the remainder from the other seven new entrants (BBC News, 2015). And these were only those who formally applied to register for work. In addition there were those intending to be self-employed, others who did not apply for registration, family dependents and students. In all at its highest, the EU Accession migrant population of the Britain was believed to total at least a million, with the majority based in and around London. In 2013 the Labour Force Survey recorded 723,000 A8 citizens as being employed in Britain (Migration Observatory, 2015). Statistics for the same year also showed that the majority of foreign workers were concentrated in London; 45 per cent of all self-employed and one-third of all employed were working in the capital (Migration Observatory, 2015). A more recent report estimated that 1,079 million foreigners were employed in the Greater London area (Salt, 2014: 51), and that, ‘At least half of the French, Italians, Dutch, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Other Europeans, West Indians, Other Americans and Australians are located in London. For several other nationalities, the proportion is over 40 per cent’ (Salt, 2014: 52). A health warning – a number of the chapters in this book have incorporated the most recent available data on the migrant presence in London. However, we know that these statistics are not finite. 1 Migrant arrivals and departures are a weekly occurrence and what may be reported at the end of 2014, might/will have changed by the time this volume has been published.
