ABSTRACT
Because of their key role in the international economy, and the size and structure of their labour markets, world cities have long functioned as major destinations for both national and international migration (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982). Like magnets, they attract the ambitious, the hopeful and the desperate. The role of big cities as major migrant destinations is not new; they have always had diverse populations. During the seventeenth century, the population increase in London was fuelled by large-scale inmigration, and Wrigley (1967) showed that almost one in four of London’s population were immigrants. London’s population also grew dramatically during the nineteenth century from one million in 1801 to 6.5 million in 1901, and a high proportion of this growth was accounted for by immigration, primarily from other parts of Britain but also from Ireland and continental Europe. The Irish in the nineteenth century can be seen as the first large-scale economic migrants to Britain, and the Huguenots in the eighteenth century and the Polish and Russian Jews in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth were some of the first political refugees and asylum seekers. Similar migration patterns characterise nineteenth-century Paris (Rhein, 1996), which sucked in migrants from all oyer provincial France, and the American cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were primarily peopled by overseas immigration (Ward, 1989). Engels’s (1846) depiction of nineteenth-century Irish migration to Britain in the aftermath of the Irish famine in his The Condition of the Working Class in England could apply to many similar groups today:
the rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of the St George’s Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000…poor Irish people.
