ABSTRACT
The post-war migration to Britain from the Caribbean and the South Asian sub-continent, while based upon imperial ties, was very much driven by economic imperatives. The rebuilding of the war-shattered economy created a demand for labour that could not be satisfied by the British population alone. The demand was particularly acute in the National Health Service, in public transport and in many sectors of manufacturing; qualified and unqualified workers, especially young single men, were invited from the Caribbean and the sub-continent to fill the vacancies. Early studies of these migrants in the British economy show that, regardless of their social origins and qualification levels, Caribbean and Asian people were largely confined to low-paid manual work, and that racial discrimination in recruitment was widespread, even after being outlawed (Daniel, 1968; Smith, 1977). The Psi Third National Survey, undertaken in 1982 found that while some progress in relative job-levels and earnings among these non-white groups had occurred, they were disproportionately suffering from the high levels of unemployment, despite some groups participating in the burgeoning self-employment sector (Brown, 1984). Moreover, racial discrimination in the labour market seemed as prevalent if not as overt as before (Brown and Gay, 1985). The Labour Force Surveys of the late 1980s (Jones, 1993) and the 1991 Census (Ballard and Kalra, 1994) confirmed the trends of the early 1980s: the minorities were upwardly mobile, expanding in self-employment but had much higher levels of unemployment than whites. It was abundantly clear, however, that each of these conditions applied to some rather than all Caribbean and Asian ethnic groups (Modood, 1991). Economic differences between migrants have become much more pronounced and much better substantiated by statistical data than was the case at the time of the Third Survey.
