Windrush Italians

In an age of information, ignorance is a choice.

Data released by the Windrush Task Force last week revealed the third-largest nationality granted status or British Citizenship through the scheme was Italians.

I was not a little surprised by this data; the scheme started in the wake of the Windrush scandal, so public perception - including my own - was therefore mostly centred on the idea it was about regularising the status of long-term Commonwealth immigrants. Indeed most of the top nations of origin are Commonwealth nations; however the scheme was also open to ‘A person of any nationality, who arrived in the UK before 31 December 1988 and is settled in the UK.’ Intrigued, I thought I’d make some effort to understand this cohort.

My first experience with Britons Italian immigration was in my first job, as a content writer for an luxury Italian e-commerce business. Round about half of the total staff were Italian; I remember taking a lap of the office and being introduced to various men who were, broadly, what I expected Italian office colleagues to be like; warm, well-dressed and offering me the darkest coffee I’d ever seen from the machines they’d bought from home for their exclusive use.

Finally, I was introduced to Enzo, who took a moment to step off a phone call – held in Italian – to greet me in a well-rounded ‘awrright mate, hah’s it gaw’in?’ He was from Leatherhead.

Italian immigration first began when many farmers in northern Italy were forced to emigrate due to a growth in rural population outstripping resources, rising food prices and by the turn of the century the impact on the "stagnant rural life" of the occupation forces of Napoleon’s revolutionary armies. This, however, was limited to only a few thousand people, who mostly worked as street traders, performers or ‘strolling artists’; Punch & Judy is a remnant of this world that still remains, which has roots in commedia dell'arte – Punch being an aglicization of Pulcinella.

But significant numbers only started arriving in the late 1800s, with the number of Italian-born people more than doubling between 1891 and 1901. Along with the increase came and economic shift, as food trades became more prevalent and vendors moved from street stalls to fixed premises. These larger groups became more established, particularly in ‘little Italies’ such as Clerkenwell, Soho, Ancoats in Manchester, West Bar in Sheffield and Grass Market in Edinburgh

Between the wars restrictions on immigration in Britain - and restrictions on emigration from Italy under Mussolini – combined to keep the population steady. Despite these restrictions, fascism also travelled over; one of the first fasci (Italian fascist sections) outside Italy was established in London in 1921, and fascist clubs soon followed in Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Following the war, large-scale recruitment programs led to the migration of thousands of Italians from southern regions such as Campania, Sicily, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, and Basilicata to Britain. This movement was fuelled by significant push factors, including the destruction caused by the war, population growth, inefficient agricultural systems, and the lifting of pre-war emigration restrictions. At the same time, pull factors played a role, as Britain's high demand for labour prompted the establishment of formal recruitment agreements between the Ministry of Labour and Italian authorities. Italians were particularly heavily concentrated in the brickworks in Peterborough and Bedford.

Italian migration was soon to taper off; in the years of the Italian economic boom in the 1960s and 1970s Italian migration to the UK reduced; in fact, during the 70s there was net emigration back to Italy. During the 1980s, Britain’s economic boom caused the profile of Italian migrants to become far more highly qualified. Since, there has been a continuing upwards growth in new migration from the 1990s onwards - in particular since the economic crisis of 2007.

Anecdotally, Friend of the Potemkin Village Idiot and former Home Office official Salman Anwar told me he ‘saw a number of people try go through the EU Settlement Scheme process but had Indefinite Leave to Remain that predated Freedom of Movement (with the EU) and couldn't convert easily Settled Status.’ He suggests that converting through the Windrush Scheme was a much easier way of regularising their status (indeed, this was the point).

Largely, this group was Italian in origin and tended to be older, which fits both historic demographics and the residency requirement of the Windrush Scheme. This fits the traditional view of Italian immigration in Britain; ‘little Italy’ founders who come mostly to work in the hospitality sector. The view is exemplified well by the tweet below;

But it isn’t clear this is still that Italian immigration is still the same. Mirroring changes in wider migration, there are demographics changes afoot; ‘EU nationals in the UK’, as Alymer puts it, ‘are a much more ethnically diverse population than the general EU population. EU citizen is not synonymous with white.’

Italy doesn't count its population by colour, but the National Institute for Statistics reports that more than 92% of the country is ‘ethnic Italian’, which is often interpreted in practical terms as white. Yet only 60% of Italians living in Britain report the same way.

In recent years the number of Italians in the UK has been bolstered by Italian Bangladeshis, who mostly centre in and around Tower Hamlets. In 2015, The Independent estimated that 6,000 Italian Bangladeshis had arrived since 2010, ‘fleeing economic stagnation in southern Europe.’ The article went on;

Many were skilled graduates who left their homes in South Asia attracted by jobs in Italy’s industrial north. But as manufacturing work has evaporated, thousands are deciding to make a second migration, to the UK.

An interviewee for Al-Jazeera added that economics was not the primary purpose of his migration, but that London ‘offered people like Maula a well-established Bangladeshi community and family contacts from home.’. This growing community has also been covered by the BBC twice, for BBC Stories and Nihal.

This community has grown significantly since the Independent article; according to the 2021 Census, there were 14,746 Italian passport holders residing in Britain who were born in Bangladesh.* This is nearly 10% of the entire Italian Bangladeshi community in Italy. This may only be a fraction of the population; in an article in 2018, the Dhaka Tribune suggested the numbers were far higher;

Reports show that in the last five years, more than 50,000 European Bangladeshis have settled in the UK, and among these people, around 30,000 arrived from Italy.

Bangladeshi Italian Welfare Association of UK President Rezaul Karim Mridha said: “Around 30,000 Italians of Bangladeshi origin arrived in the UK in the past five years. According to the data provided by the Italian consulate, around 20,000 of them are presently living here.”

This gives an insight into the changing demographic makeup of European immigration, as outlined in the chart above (credit to Alymer TH). 20% of the 368,738 Italian passport holders resident in England and Wales in the 2021 census reporting as Asian results in a population of 73,747. And, as Karl Williams recently pointed out, of the 138,760 'EU Settlement Scheme Permit' visas the Home Office has so far issued, just 3.2% went to nationals of the EU27.

British immigration policy is made in a data desert. As I’ve previously written, ‘this is not confined to the fiscal and economic impacts of migration, however, but the societal impact too’.

This lack of data lends itself to vibes; the traditional view of the demographics of Italian immigrants - those who utilised the Windrush scheme - is still the most popular, even if it is clearly no longer accurate.

The impact of mass immigration on public services, public finances, the economy and society is so great that we cannot afford to make a decision with anything other than the full facts. That doesn’t just apply to politicians and civil servants, but to everyone. The immigration debate is shifting from a reliance on vibes to one on facts, and this is to be welcomed; but to facilitate us going further and catching the public, and policy making, up to the realities of immigration is going to require us to collect and publish as much data on immigration as is possible. In an age of information, ignorance is a choice.