Immigration is front-page news just now, but discussions about it tend to generate more heat than light. There also seems to be confusion over the terms ‘migration’, ‘immigration’ and ‘emigration’. I looked up what these words really mean and found some definitions.
Migration: the movement of people away from their usual place of residence to a new place of residence, either across an international border or within a State.
Immigration: the process through which individuals become permanent residents or citizens of another country. Historically, the process of immigration has been of great social, economic, and cultural benefit to states.
Emigration: the process of leaving a country permanently and going to live in another one.
In a nutshell, people who emigrate are migrating in order to immigrate to somewhere else.
Migration is not new – through the ages, humanity has swept back and forth across the planet, driven by war, disease, persecution, famine, natural disaster, greed, ambition, new technology, or combinations of these. Our ancestors spread out from Africa over hundreds of millennia, evolving to become our current species, Homo sapiens sapiens.
When Dogger was more than a name on the shipping forecast
Some 14,000 years ago, early humans inhabited caves across much of Britain but were driven out by one of the frequent ice ages, with the water freezing solid, lowering the sea to a point far below present levels. In those days, you could walk from France to Britain over the great land bridge of Doggerland.
After 3,000 years, though, as the Holocene period began, higher temperatures came to Europe, melting the ice sheets. Sea levels rose, submerging much of the land bridge. Finally, around 8,000 years ago, an underwater landslip broke loose from Norway, triggering a tidal wave which scoured out the English Channel and destroyed Doggerland completely.
Suddenly, Britain was an island, accessible only by sea, inhabited by nomads, who followed herds of game and lived on what they could catch.
The advent of farming brings stability – and migration
Far away, however, in the warm, fertile triangle between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people had found their survival chances improved when they started domesticating animals instead of hunting them and planting crops instead of foraging for wild fruit and berries. Farming became for them a reliable way to feed the family. Everyone had enough to eat, even if it meant staying in one place to mind crops and livestock – some of the yield could even be stored against lean times.
With enhanced nutrition came increased fertility. More children survived, working the fields, reaching adulthood. Sooner or later, the firstborn took over the farm. Land had become something people could possess, and younger offspring had to go and find their own arable land. Over generations, this produced a ripple effect, with new migratory waves fanning out across Europe and Asia.
Some reached the Channel, built boats, and sailed into the unknown, seeking pastures new in Britain. Aliens in small boats – they must have startled the natives, but somehow everyone managed to co-exist. They had, after all, things in common. Even farmers sometimes had to hunt, and early farming methods could still be seasonally nomadic. The advantage of a consistent food supply must eventually have convinced the hunters, and gradually a settled, agrarian, land-owning lifestyle established itself as the norm.
More seaborne immigrants followed; by the time the Romans arrived, there were numerous tribes and kingdoms of Britons, Picts and Gaels across these islands, a demographic mix further enlivened by the so-called ‘Celtic’ peoples, itinerant tribes originating in ancient Gaul, and by a motley collection of Germanic tribespeople.
What the Romans did for us
From 43 CE (Common Era), Roman-occupied Britain became the province of Britannia, its northern boundary at Hadrian’s Wall. Beyond the wall, Roman writ no longer ran. A kind of uneasy truce prevailed, the legions held at a distance by belligerent Celts and Picts.
These Roman soldiers, speaking mainly Latin or Greek, hailed from across the empire – Libyans, Algerians, Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, Austrians, Dacians, Thracians, Slovenians, Belgians, Ethiopians, Bulgarians, northern Italians, conquered Gauls, Black Afro-Romans, Syrians and other ethnicities. Many were garrisoned in Britain for their entire careers. On retirement, some were granted land, settling down to farm, marrying local wives, raising families, and becoming absorbed into the population.
Roman dominion over a relatively stable Britannia lasted nearly four centuries. In Europe, though, Rome was feeling the strain of political infighting while repelling 200 years of attacks by Germanic tribes. Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Huns swept across Europe, harrying everything in their path. The Romans called them ‘barbarians’ (from a Greek word signifying unintelligible babble, their contemptuous term for these strange, uncouth languages).
Angles and Saxons and such
In 406 CE, barbarians pierced the Roman defences on the Rhine, driving deep into the empire, advancing at speed. In 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome itself, the Eternal City. The Roman garrisons in Britannia now abandoned their province, rushing back to Rome with the entire provincial administration and many fighting-age natives, leaving Britain undefended.
Angles, Saxons, and Germans soon filled the vacuum. Saxon and Danish raiders, and the Scoti and Picts, had long harried Britannia’s northern and eastern edges – now the gates stood wide open. A wave of Angles and Jutes arrived in the mid-fifth century. Later came Vikings, establishing themselves in York and across large areas of the country, intermarrying with the locals and stirring new DNA into the British gene pool.
Scandinavian raids continued until 1066, when the English King Harold Godwinson defeated the Vikings under Harald Hardrada, only to die himself days later at Hastings, defeated by the Norman-French Duke William (who was, ironically, of Viking descent).
The displacement of people
Over the years, millions of people were also emigrating – from Britain and elsewhere – often under duress.
For centuries, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided Europe, from Iceland to the Mediterranean, seizing and enslaving men, women and children. Crusades raged from Sweden to North Africa, displacing hundreds of thousands of refugees. Mongol hordes ravaged Eastern Europe, conquering Hungary, Asia Minor, large areas of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Persia and even China.
The great European empires bought millions of Africans from their chiefs, transporting them into slavery. In America, settlers killed or displaced enormous numbers of indigenous people. Religious persecution forced 80,000 Puritans to flee to America.
The Highland Clearances dispossessed between 70,000 and 150,000 Scots tenants to provide grazing for sheep. The Potato Famine forced two million starving people to leave Ireland. The Edict of Nantes drove 200,000 to 400,000 Protestants (Huguenots) to flee France; from the late 19th century, nearly 15 million starving Italians abandoned their homes.
This pattern continued through the 20th and 21st centuries, with huge numbers of displaced persons fleeing armed conflict in their homelands. The phenomenon persists to this day. What has all this migration meant for human relationships? If we’re so intermingled, what is the reason for our widespread mistrust of strangers? Is it just a question of offence being the best form of defence? I’ll explore this riddle in the second part of ‘Incomers’.
Part two of ‘Incomers’ is available here..
