The death last week of Queen Elizabeth II inspired grief for many, who felt that not just the United Kingdom but indeed the world had lost a beloved and irreplaceable figure. For others, the queen’s death touched off renewed debate over the relevance of the monarchy in today’s world, and for others yet served as reminder of the long and painful period of British colonialism. More narrowly, it also marked the coda of a pivotal era in international migration. The queen’s seven decades on the throne overlapped with a remarkable amount of international movement, as the planet entered its globalized, postwar era. Much of the movement, particularly to and from the United Kingdom, came as a result of decolonization, which was accompanied by a large-scale reshuffling of people throughout what had once been the world’s largest empire, covering nearly one-fourth of the globe. As the empire eroded it was to some degree replaced by the Commonwealth, a looser confederation of independent countries with a shared language and historical ties. Many former colonies were the origins of migrants who came to Great Britain in subsequent years, in a movement that Sri Lankan-born intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan once succinctly summed up as, “We are here because you were there.” At first, Commonwealth citizens enjoyed the right to freely enter the United Kingdom. But restrictions in the 1960s and 1970s drew an end to this policy, as Will Somerville and Peter William Walsh explained in their 2021 profile of UK immigration policies for the Migration Information Source. Still, the share of immigrants in the United Kingdom grew dramatically: In 1951, one year before Elizabeth’s accession, 4.2 percent of the UK population was foreign born; in 2020, the share had risen to 14 percent. Today, the United Kingdom is home to nearly 9.4 million immigrants. It is also a significant country of emigration, with nearly as many of its nationals living abroad as Poland. In fact, contrary to public perception, the United Kingdom was primarily a country of emigration for most of the 20th century, with trends only changing in the 1980s. About 700,000 UK-born migrants live in the United States. Among many other things, Queen Elizabeth was a link to a past era, the human embodiment of a bridge through time. Since her birth 96 years ago and accession in 1952, remarkable shifts have occurred not just in her United Kingdom, but indeed around the world. Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected] |
