It’s a familiar story: pro-migration propagandists, fears of manpower shortages, a humanitarian crisis in Europe, an ambitious but nebulous foreign policy and a government riven by factionalism – all combining to create the perfect conditions for an unprecedented migrant inflow and a swift public backlash. Stand aside, Boris – I am of course referring to the immigration crisis of 1709.
At the time, Queen Anne – who was to be our last Stuart monarch – sat on the throne of the recently created Kingdom of Great Britain. But with no surviving children, the Protestant succession was in a precarious position. The War of the Spanish Succession was raging in Europe, the New World and on the high seas. After eight years of conflict, and notwithstanding great victories like Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenaarde, the Anglo-Dutch and Austrian Habsburg Grand Alliance was still unable to bring the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, to the negotiating table.
This was an era before organised political parties. Anne’s chief minister was a Tory, Sidney Godolphin, 1st Earl of Godolphin, but the parliamentary coalition upon which he depended was increasingly dominated by the Whig Junto – a cabal of five influential pro-war Whig peers. British war aims were therefore fluid. They included: thwarting Louis XIV’s bid for continental hegemony (‘universal monarchy’) by maintaining the European ‘balance of power’; the security and expansion of British commerce; colonial aggrandisement in the Americas; preventing the restoration of the would-be James III; and sustaining the ‘Protestant Interest’ in Europe against the hydra-headed forces of international Popery.
It is against this backdrop that the Foreign Protestants Naturalisation Act was enacted. It provided for the naturalisation of all foreign-born Protestants in Britain, so long as they swore allegiance to the Crown and took sacrament in any Protestant or Reformed Church. Crucially, this meant naturalisation was open not just to Anglicans but also to nonconformists – a notable (and controversial) departure from the principles underlying the Test Acts of the 1670s.
The new Act was partly about regularising foreign Protestants already living in Britain. But mainly it was about increasing immigration. The passage of the Act through parliament was preceded by publicity campaigns and diplomatic missions to war-torn Protestant German lands, not to mention years – indeed decades – of lobbying by writers like Daniel Defoe, political economists like Sir William Petty and landed proprietors such as John Archdale, Governor of South Carolina.
They were able to make some persuasive arguments, not least because, up until this point, Britain had had a pretty good track record with Protestant migrants from Europe – mostly French Huguenots. Modern historians estimate around 50,000 Huguenots settled in England over a period of about 50 years, equating to annual population growth of 0.03% (net migration today is about 30 times that rate, adding 0.9% to the population a year).
The Huguenots brought with them skills, business prowess and capital (estimated at roughly £900 million in today’s money), and made a substantial contribution to industry, trade and the fine arts. In essence, a small number of highly skilled, culturally similar migrants were able to swiftly assimilate into British society, much to Britain’s benefit (an apt comparison might be the East African Asians who arrived in Britain in the 1970s – and how this wave of immigration has been used to justify much higher volumes of immigration more recently).
So what went wrong in 1709?
The Foreign Protestants Naturalisation Act was enacted in March. But by the summer, 13,000 German migrants, mostly from the devastated Rhineland Palatinate, had sailed down to Rotterdam and crossed the sea to Britain. This represented a rate of immigration at least 12 times higher than the Huguenot inflow, and it was concentrated largely in London and the southeast (not unlike immigration today).
The ‘Palatines’ (as they were known in the press) were not like the Huguenot merchant elites who had come before them – they lacked the skills for which the Huguenots were prized, and arrived in such concentrated numbers as to overwhelm the capacity of the British economy to absorb them. Soon they were living in tent cities in Camberwell and other outlying parts of London, and – in an all too familiar story from the last few years – government spending on supporting the migrants soared.
Boris Johnson’s detractors are wont to label the post-2020 immigration surge the ‘Boriswave’; in a similar vein, we might perhaps call the 1709 migration surge the ‘Godolphinwave’. In each case, the government of the day had underestimated the impact of opening up Britain’s borders, and migrant numbers far exceeded expectations.
In 1709, the public backlash was swift and brutal, and criticism of the Palatine policy soon became intertwined with the popular grievances that led to the anti-Whig Sacheverell riots in the summer of 1710. For reasons of high politics, Queen Anne dismissed Godolphin in September 1710, and the following year, the Tory administration led by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, repealed the Naturalisation Act in order to cut off the extraordinary flow of migrants. The Palatines already in England eventually re-migrated, but the fiasco had already completely discredited the pro-immigration camp.
Their arguments had not been based solely on the merits of previous Huguenot migrants – far from it. Before the advent of Smithian classical economics, one of the prevailing mercantilist preoccupations was with demography, the view being that economic growth was largely a function of population growth. For example, according to one pamphlet of 1683, ‘An Apology for the Protestants of France’, ‘No country is rich but in proportion to its numbers’. In a similar vein, immigration maximalist Sir William Petty wrote that ‘fewness of people is real poverty’.
Of course, such arguments are influential again today in some quarters – albeit in a more econometric idiom. In Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts for instance, immigration is modelled in terms of labour force expansion and therefore as boosting raw GDP growth – with little if any reference to GDP per capita numbers or productivity growth, i.e. metrics that touch directly on individual living standards.
However, the 17th- and 18th-century mercantilist arguments were not purely economic in their presuppositions – far from it. In the words of Defoe:
People are indeed the essential of commerce, and the more people, the more trade; the more trade, the more money, the more money, the more strength; and the more strength, the greater the nation.
Those last two clauses are key to our understanding of the pro-migration stance. This was the era of emergent economic nationalism – of ‘jealousy of trade’. In an era where trade was generally seen as a zero sum game, and with Great Britain engaged in intense military and geopolitical competition with other European powers, the relative strength of the nation was what mattered, not rising living standards (though ‘luxury’ was a separate subject of intense debate too).
Contemporaries were struck by France’s sheer size and apparently unlimited reserves of manpower, which had allowed Louis XIV to sustain decades of almost continuous fighting without evident economic penalty – indeed, trade had flourished with France’s American colonies. With hindsight, we know that Louis XIV had around 21m subjects in France alone – double the population of Great Britain, the Netherlands and the Austrian Habsburg Empire combined.
For writers like Defoe, immigration was ultimately a tool to be used towards the end of maintaining the European balance of power by boosting Britain’s economic heft. This is also where colonies and trading posts overseas came in – as counterweights to the commercial might of continental powers. Of course, establishing and growing colonies in the Americas required colonists to tame the wilderness and work the land – hence the warm reception Governor Archdale received from the Godolphin administration when lobbying for migration from Germany. Archdale personally owned 48,000 acres in South Carolina.
In other words, underlying the 1709 immigration crisis was a convergence of geopolitical ‘reason of state’ with vested business interests. Had there been an analogue to the modern immigration ‘Shortage Occupation List’ in 1709, there can be little doubt that Archdale would have been one of its chief cheerleaders.
However, there was a strong ideological bent to British foreign policy too. The European balance of power was a confessional commitment, not just a fiscal-military one. Modern English and British national identity was forged in patriotic opposition to absolutist Catholic powers like France and Spain. English liberty was contrasted with Popish tyranny.
But this identity was connected with a broader conception of the ‘Protestant Interest’ in Europe. Supporting Protestant powers like the Netherlands and Protestant German states was not just a matter of geopolitical self-interest. As argued in anti-clerical pamphlets like the anonymous ‘Reasons humbly offer’d for a Law to enact the Castration of Popish Ecclesiasticks’, solidarity with co-religionists in a European Protestant alliance was a moral obligation. For many of the more assertive advocates of the Protestant interest, anyone who opposed Protestant immigration was morally suspect – much as some pro-migration commentators today are apt to label any degree of immigration scepticism as motivated by xenophobia or racism.
For many Whigs in particular, commitments to the transnational Protestant community could and did outweigh the national interest. They tended to support military intervention in Europe, no matter the cost at home. Indeed, financing the War of the Spanish Succession entailed both heavy tax increases and a massive rise in borrowing that added over £28.8m to the national debt – roughly 38% of pre-war GDP. Tories tended to prefer a blue-water strategy of global naval supremacy, which they argued would be less costly and more advantageous to Britain’s commerce.
Unsurprisingly, the arguments used in the run up to 1709 tended to lean heavily on the idea of the Protestant Interest – hence the ‘Protestants’ part of the Foreign Protestants Naturalisation Act. Offering refuge to displaced European Protestants was portrayed as the natural domestic complement to advancing the Protestant cause through feats of arms abroad.
Again, this feels familiar. An attachment to a cause that is not necessarily one and the same with the national interest is an all too common feature of foreign and immigration policy today. Take, for instance, former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell stating that ‘When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration… I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare’. Or consider how the need to uphold the ‘international rules based order’ entails an absolute commitment to treaties like the ECHR that have done so much to undermine immigration enforcement.
Indeed, I would argue that, for good or ill, foreign policy, geopolitics and international relations have played a far more important role in setting British immigration policy over the years than have pure economic considerations. Call this the Primat der Aussenpolitik interpretation of British immigration policy, if you will.
For example, the next major piece of immigration legislation in Britain after 1709 was the Aliens Act 1793. This was a response to the influx of emigres from the Revolutionary France (around 4,000 in 1792 alone) and fears of Jacobin subversion. It provided for the registration, monitoring and deportation of undesirable foreigners, and was the legal framework for the Alien Office. Notionally a sub-department of the Home Office, the Alien Office was in fact a unit for the domestic and external surveillance of foreign people of interest, a part of the broader bureaucratic war effort against Napoleon.
I would argue that subsequent immigration policy driven mainly by international relations includes (but is not limited to): the Aliens Restriction Act 1914; the British Nationality Act 1948 (a product of diplomatic wrangling at the 1947 Imperial Conference); accession to the EEC in 1973 and all that followed from EEC/EU freedom of movement up until Brexit; and most recently, the Johnson government’s attempt to fashion an immigration system fit for ‘Global Britain’.
Economic justifications were deployed for increasing immigration, and increasingly so from the Blair years onwards; but this was far more about selling policy to a sceptical public than elucidating the underlying dynamics of immigration policy driven by elites’ foreign policy preoccupations. As one Blair era official has said about the decision not to impose transitional controls on migration from new EU countries in 2004:
The primary argument was the political one – this was the right thing to do, we attached a lot of importance to them as democratic countries and keeping our position as the number one friend of eastern and central Europeans.
The design of the post-2020 immigration system owes an awful lot to foreign policy priorities too. For example, the 2.06m study visas issued over 2021-24 accounted for 48% of all visas issued during that period. By the 2022/23 academic year, the international student population had risen to 759,000 – an increase of 204,000, or 37%, on 2019/20. This was directly downstream of the plans set out in the 2019 ‘International Education Strategy’ (IES), which sought to massively increase student migration. Partly, this was justified in economic terms, with British higher education cast as a globally competitive export sector. But the IES was also replete with references to ‘soft power’, ‘global reach’ and ‘global partnerships’ enabled and enhanced by Britain’s higher education sector, reflecting the prevailing elite preoccupation with soft power.
There is no evidence this has done anything for Britain’s standing in the world. But the impacts here in Britain have been charted in great detail by Neil O’Brien MP and others, from the ‘Deliveroo visa’ scandal to the fact that 16,000 international students claimed asylum in Britain in 12 months. So again, as with 1709 and other episodes, immigration policy driven in large part by foreign policy considerations has had adverse effects here at home.
Of course, one big difference between recent years and immigration misadventures in the past – including 1709 – is that Britain’s ruling elite were relatively responsive to public opinion. The 1709 Act was repealed within little more than two years of being enacted and the experiment was not repeated. Similarly, attempts were made to curtail the British Nationality Act 1948 in fairly short order, notably with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.
But since 1997, government after government has broken promises to control and reduce immigration. Net migration totalled 68,000 in the 25 years before 1997; in the following 25 years it totalled 5.9m. It reached 906,000 in the year ending June 2022. More than two-thirds of voters consistently say immigration has been ‘too high over the last decade’, and yet current policy – on education, on safe and legal routes and even on work visas – still locks us in to net (legal) migration of at least 340,000 per year for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, on illegal migration, international commitments preclude the Government from changing the law to take the actions necessary to stop the small boats and forestall bogus asylum claims.
The debate over immigration policy tends to revolve around arguments about either the economy or culture and integration. But I am increasingly coming to the view that a revolution in foreign policy – a ‘Gaullist reawakening’, in the words of Robert Jenrick – is just as, if not more important, in unpicking the mass migration paradigm. Our elites should care less about virtue signalling on the global stage and more about the welfare of the British people. A more pragmatic, less starry-eyed approach to immigration would follow – less 1709 or 2019-24, and more 1793.
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