A article on the history of racism, class and border controls
http://www.basepublication.org/?p=665Quick history lesson for those that say we need border controls.
UK Modern immigration control started with the Aliens Act of 1905 (brought in by a Liberal Government after its was introduced by a Tory one and defended by the Labour movement as combating cheap foreign labour)
The act was aimed at Jews (UK has always been an anti-Semitic country):
This legislation was the culmination of a long period of cross-class fulminating over the “problem” of Jewish immigrants arriving in Britain after fleeing pogroms in the Eastern European Pale of Settlement in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The content of these “debates” often had “Aliens” as a stand-in for Jews but despite this coded feature, the antisemitism of the discussions was hardly hidden. The context of Jews in Britain wasn’t a new one and pre-modern histories of Judeophobia, such as the longstanding Edict of Expulsion, became attached and adapted to these new waves of migration and the context of further capitalist development.
The hatred this fed on also manifested itself in far right attack mobs (just as anti-immigration stuff does now)
The British Brothers League was a proto-Fascist single-issue campaign in the East End that held rallies and protests advocating for immigration control from 1901-1905. It targeted the area in London where most Jews lived because Jewish immigration was the main focus.
The Jewish community were not gonna take this lying down (just as they and the communists were the ones leading the fight against Mosley while the Labour party sat back and did nothing):
...all consistent resistance to immigration controls was led by working class Jews and Jewish organisations, or Jews having to struggle within existing trade unions against support for controls. The anarchist Yiddish-language newspaper Der Arbeter Fraint (Workers’ Friend), based in the East End, castigated the British working class for their nationalism. The Alien Defence League was set up by Jewish workers during this time, with its headquarters in Brick Lane.
Shame that 100 years later the labour movement is still peddling the same racist nationalist shit