Discrimination against Immigrants

1.3Discrimination against Immigrants

Nevertheless, immigrants were making a valuable contribution to the British economy. Abercrombie observes that ethnic minorities tended to be concentrated in certain industries and in the less-skilled occupations with lower pay, were vulnerable to unemployment and also disadvantaged in housing (257). They were “heavily concentrated in particular industries, often those in relative decline; they occup[ied] lower socio-economic positions; ha[d] lower earnings; work[ed] longer, and often unsocial, hours” (256). Furthermore, “the quality of housing occupied by ethnic minorities [was] much lower than that occupied by whites,” properties were usually older terraced houses or flats that had fewer rooms but more people per room (256). Fung acknowledges that surveys indicated that by 1985, 90% of the UK Chinese community was still engaged in the catering industry, since they did not have any other possibilities to choose from. “Chinese restaurant and takeaway workers [were] subject to customers not paying their bills, verbal racist abuse and even violent assault” (Fung). However, most Chinese tolerated and ignored antisocial behaviour, they had even been nicknamed the silent minority. Fung implies that nowadays “the British host community is generally respectful of the Chinese Community which they see as contributing to the UK in a positive way.” On the other hand, the British media frequently presented biased reports of world events in which China was involved (Fung). This resulted in British society being prejudiced against the Chinese.

Although the white British society was clearly prejudiced against the Chinese one, its hostility towards black minorities was rooted in a physical distaste for black people. It was a most primitive form of racism (Phillips, New World 271). The West Indian was by the British defined as the other, interior to them. The British made the West Indian realise that he was the other, they were reminding him of his interiority with derogatory notices in the streets of London and made the immigrants understand generally hostile attitudes towards them (Nyitsotemve 1-2). Caryl Phillips implies that Caribbean migrants had great expectations about starting a new life and seeking a better future in the UK, however, the Britain to which they had migrated was not the Britain they expected to find (New World 269-70). Phillips quotes a Trinidadian who had been in Britain since the early 1930s:

Almost the entire population of Britain really expects the coloured man to live in an inferior area devoted to coloured people, and not to have any free and open choice of a living place. Most British people would be quite unwilling for a black man to enter their home, nor would they wish to work with one as a colleague (270).

Dabydeen confirms that black immigrants were “given the properties they ‘deserved’, on the basis of highly questionable, culturally biased, and prejudiced comments about the way these people live[d]” (215).

As for the 1970s, Marwick characterizes Britain as a society marked by race discrimination and racial tension, which it was very difficult for young members of racial minorities to get a job in (201). Although the government passed immigration laws and tried to control and regulate amounts of immigrants flowing into Britain, they did not appear to be helpful. According to the interviewed white people, “the laws on immigration [were] so confused the MPs themselves ha[dn’t] a clue to what they mean[t]. But they turn[ed] their back on it” (218). Racist attitudes of white society were strongly expressed by the National Front that openly and violently confronted immigrant communities. It was as late as 1976 that the government introduced a Race Relations Act “which declared all forms of discrimination illegal, and set up a Commission for Racial Equality with powers of enforcement” (220).

A series of interviews carried out in the late seventies with West Indians in London by Thomas J. Cottle proves what a difference one’s skin colour still made. “You think a white man’s going to lose his job before a black one? Not in a life-time. Immigrants come last and go first, man. Everybody knows that” (216). The interviews also demonstrate West Indian picture of how they believed whites perceived them:

You are unwanted. You are here because some higher order official let you stay, not because I want you. [...] You want my job, you want my food, you want to live in my home, you want to use my school, my hospital, my stores. But don’t take it personally; I have no quarrel with you as a person. It’s immigration I cannot tolerate (218).

As Marwick suggests, it must be remembered that the immigrant communities were heterogeneous. West Indians, the most oppressed group, were in many ways the most assimilable group (221). “They were English-speaking Christians, who had studied their Shakespeare and Wordsworth at school, [and] seemed able to synthesise [...] a broad understanding of the ways of the British” (Phillips, New World 273). Thus, many Britons found Caribbean migrants uncomfortably and surprisingly British. As Phillips points out, the second generation of West Indians, growing up in Britain, regarded themselves as British: “We spoke the same accent as the other kids, we watched the same television programmes, we went to the same schools, we did the same exams. Surely we were British” (275-76). But because of the well rooted assumption that British people are white, a black man could never be considered a British man, and their identity was certainly an issue in the late 1960s and 1970s. “The Black had been made to understand that his colour is a curse,” black immigrants encountered rejection, segregation and debasement (Nyitsotemve 3).