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This book aims to describe and analyse what has changed in public attitudes towards immigrants. With that objective in mind, it examines expressions of feelings about immigrants in Britain during the period between 1921 and 2021, and investigates how these attitudes were expressed, what words and phrases were used, in what context attitudes were articulated and where they came from.
In a broad sense, this description and analysis address a wider issue: If history is made by humans, what external influences direct their actions or are they guided by unchangeable basic instincts?
By focussing on one aspect of immigration history, namely the changes in how immigrants in Britain were perceived during the hundred years after 1921, this book also strives to contribute to the historiography on the integration of immigrants into modern Western societies. It hopes to increase knowledge and deepen understanding of the past, but this book also has a contemporary relevance, because attitudes to immigrants and their integration into the society of the country where they settle continue to be topics of debate.
This is not the first book on immigrants in Britain. Much research on this subject has been published, from comprehensive historical surveys to reviews of specific aspects of immigration, with attention usually focussed on specific groups, locations and periods. However, this book applies a rather new historical-linguistic approach with brief international comparisons to investigate the expression of attitudes to immigrants in Britain in the hundred years after 1921, revealing long-term developments, many of which started well before 1921. It also attempts to resolve an apparent contradiction in the existing literature: if Britain cannot be classified as a country in which immigrants faced unremitting hostility, how come negative views about immigrants remained fairly constant – was there really not much new under the sun or was the expression of attitudes to immigrants more fluid, despite seemingly obvious similarities between past and present? Furthermore, this study draws on primary sources that for this purpose have so far been relatively unused, such as newspapers and dictionaries, and analyses them with the help of the existing historical and linguistic literature.
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