‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ That is the famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty, symbolising the story of America as a ‘nation of immigrants’.
But there are competing ideas of America. This second era of Donald Trump will now see a clash as sharp as any in America’s history between nativist sentiment and the idea of an America open to migration. The President-elect has pledged the largest deportation campaign in American history. His aim is to remove up to 15 million people. That this includes not just recent arrivals but those in America over many years goes too far for most Americans, as the Wall Street Journal noted after the election. Exit polls show that six out of ten Americans support a path to regularisation for most of those in the US without legal status, though that choice increasingly polarises voters on party lines.
Annie Moore, from County Cork in Ireland, travelling with her two brothers to join their parents in 1892, was the first to sail past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. This was the gateway through which almost 12m new migrants came to America from the 1890s to the 1920s. Though Ellis Island closed as an immigration processing centre in the 1950s, millions of Americans still visit Ellis Island today for a different, related purpose. This historic gateway to American citizenship has been reimagined as a migration museum. Over a third of Americans can trace their family history to an ancestor whose story of becoming American involves the site.
I was reflecting on the story of Ellis Island in giving the Migration Museum’s annual lecture last week. The Migration Museum describes itself as ‘Britain’s missing museum’, since there is no permanent, dedicated museum on the topic in this country. It is currently engaging public audiences in its latest temporary home in Lewisham shopping centre, on its own journey to a landmark permanent home in the City from 2027 to educate visitors about Britain’s migration story.
Yet the story of Ellis Island in the America of Donald Trump is a cautionary tale. It shows there are limits to how far the history of immigration can shape the politics of today if a foundational story about America speaks to only half of a society.
Britain is not America. Some of America’s deepest culture clashes – on guns, abortion and healthcare – are on issues that seem broadly settled here. Immigration is certainly a sharply contested and polarising issue on both sides of the Atlantic. The history of immigration, race and diversity are closely linked – and increasingly contested on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet there are significant differences. One deep fissure in the US story is that black America has a different origin story – of unfreedom – to that proclaimed by the Statue of Liberty. In Britain, the Windrush in 1948 is a different, complex story: voluntary migration, as a legacy of Empire, from those with equal rights – in principle if not in practice – as British citizens from the Commonwealth.
Britain’s history is often a messier, more complicated narrative – with no similar constitutional declarations or official narratives to those of the United States. So how do we join the dots for ourselves – and take the lesson from a divided America by trying to transcend polarisation rather than reinforcing it?
That means going beyond countering anti-migration stories, of being ‘swamped’ or ‘flooded’ by migrants, with the idea of happy ‘waves’ of migration over the centuries instead. Such a ritual exchange of worldviews is unlikely to move the conversation forward. About a third of people are the children or grandchildren of migrants to this country, while something like half of the population of England have four grandparents from inside England itself, without crossing borders within Britain. A story of migration in the making of modern Britain should seek to engage both groups – because this is not just the story of those who came to Britain, but of the people and places that they joined too.
The spirit of writing new chapters into the national story is much more about what we want to add – not a proposal to take something away. It is about trying to weave into the tapestry of a national story all the strands and journeys that form part of it. It is a history of those who welcomed migrants to their communities and also of the contestation and debate from those less confident about new arrivals in the UK.
A Migration Museum is not a Migration Advisory Committee. It cannot tell a government what the optimal level of migration might be at the end of the parliament. But it can settle something more important. The foundational questions raised by immigration are not the policy choices of ‘how many’ or how to select visa policy to make sure ‘they’ are good for ‘us’. What our history of immigration has settled is the existential question – of whether migrants and their children can become ‘us’.
Enoch Powell thought that was deeply unlikely, giving his infamous speech just as my father was arriving in Britain from India. We cannot know what Powell’s ghost would now have made of Kemi Badenoch becoming leader of the Conservatives. Nor do we know what her experience of coming back to Britain from Nigeria as a teenager will mean for her voice in the immigration debates to come.
The lesson from America is that an appeal to history is unlikely to be sufficient if a nation is split down the middle on how to handle migration fairly today. But if we can seek more shared ground on the story of how we got here, that could be one foundation for more constructive conversations about the choices we face on migration today too.
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