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Opinions on immigration are not set in stone, suggests Rob Ford – but they may be set in generations. Zeroing in on the experience of the United Kingdom since the end of World War II, Ford – a political scientist at the University of Manchester – explains how this generation’s ‘other’ becomes the next generation’s ‘neighbor’ – “a very remarkable transformation.”

“And so,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “we’ve definitely got a situation now where there’s just so many more people who, if you say immigrants, they don’t just hear an alien other, they hear or can see in their mind’s eye, a relative or a friend, or a child, spouse or whatever it might be.”

Although there are clearly other factors at play, he acknowledges and discusses, nonetheless “generational change is one of the most underestimated forces in politics and society.”

Those other factors include race, how someone arrives on a foreign shore, how closely a new community has contact with the existing communities, and levels of polarization among natives. “[O]ne of the things I’ve learned is the story is always complicated,” the 2022 fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences admitted. “It’s one of the things that makes communicating social science research both challenging and rewarding is how do you tell a complicated story clearly, but without losing that vital nuance. But however well you do it, what gets heard, is out of your control.”

Ford has told his story – focusing on public opinion, electoral choice and party politics – in a series of well-received books and edited collections. His first book, Revolt on the Right, written with Matthew Goodwin, detailed the rise of the UK Independence Party and was named 2015 Political Book of the Year by Paddypower, while a book written with Maria Sobolewska, Brexitland, received the 2022 WJM Mackenzie Book Prize from the Political Studies Association (which also gave Ford a special recognition prize in 2017). Ford also edited two volumes of short essays, Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box and More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box, aimed at a general audience.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: “As I look ahead, I’m filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber, foaming with much blood.” So said the conservative politician Enoch Powell, in an explosive speech in 1968, warning about the effect of mass immigration. We’re nearly six decades on, yet immigration remains a political football in the UK – where an election was announced shortly after this interview was recorded. In 2023 it’s thought that well over a million people migrated into the UK. And that net migration — that’s those who immigrated minus those who emigrated — was nearly 700,000. Yet there’s been a surprising trend in attitudes to immigration, as Rob Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, explains.

Rob Ford, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Rob Ford: Delighted to be here.

Edmonds: Immigration is what we’re talking about today, in particular attitudes to immigration. The UK, I think was a reasonably homogenous country before World War II. Can you describe what happens to the numbers of immigrants after that?

Ford: Yes, well, the big turning point, the first big turning point in the story of post-war immigration in the UK, is 1948, when the Labour government passes the British Nationality Act, which wasn’t actually supposed to be about immigration at all. It was supposed to be about maintaining good relations with the Commonwealth. If you look at the parliamentary debates on it, they don’t mention immigration from what we ended up calling the new Commonwealth even once. But what it did was confer what was called Commonwealth citizenship on all of the people of the current and former colonies of the British Empire, which, of course, is an awful lot of places and an awful lot of people, the whole Indian subcontinent, many of the islands of the West Indies, much of Africa.

And so, all of those people from that day, had the right, unrestricted, to migrate to Britain, to work in Britain, once they lived here, to vote in British elections, a right they still retain incidentally. And what rapidly took the government by surprise as we move from the 1940s into the 1950s, is that growing numbers of people began to exercise that right. First of all, tens of thousands, then, by the end of the 50s, early 1960s, we’re looking at hundreds of thousands. This is the period where what we now call the kind of big ethnic minority communities in Britain first start to form in our big cities.

Edmonds: They’re coming mainly from the subcontinent, India, from Pakistan, and from the West Indies.

Ford: That’s right. The West Indians were the first to arrive, hence, we now have the great symbol of the Empire, Windrush that was, I think, a former cruise ship that was repurposed, and was one of the first tranches of workers coming from Jamaica to come and work in London. The numbers from South Asia start to pick up a bit more in the early 1960s, particularly parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, there are parts of Bangladesh that had connections to the British Navy, and much of what we now call Indian cuisine in Britain has actually Bangladeshi chefs from the Navy, who came and settled here and founded Indian restaurants, and a part of Pakistan called Mirpur, where the government built a huge dam and displaced an awful lot of people who then came in large numbers, often to Birmingham in the northern mill towns, and then that would set up chain migration. So you can often have whole communities over here, who can trace their roots back to the same cluster of villages in that particular bit of Pakistan.

Edmonds: So large numbers coming from South Asia and from the Caribbean. And then there’s another big wave a couple of decades after Britain joins the European Union. Explain what happens then.

Ford: Yes, so Britain joined the, as it was then, the EEC [European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union], in 1973. From the beginning, one of the founding principles of the EEC was the free movement of goods and labor across borders, the so-called single market, it wasn’t particularly a big issue in terms of immigration early on, because most of the countries in the EEC were sort of similar levels of prosperity. There was some anxiety when Greece, Portugal, Spain joined in the 1980s. And there was a lot of migration from those countries, but mainly to their neighbors, mainly to France, some to Germany as well. But then in the 2000s, you had the post-communist societies, the so-called Accession Eight — Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia and so on — joining and there was a great, big, long discussion at EU level about on what terms they will be brought into the single market. And Tony Blair, who was very keen to make new friends in Europe and also this is one of the examples of his more idealistic streak, he said Britain would accept migrants from these new countries without any kind of transitional controls. So the EU negotiated this deal where you could have some controls on who could come in for up to seven years. He did that thinking that most of the other big countries in Europe would be similarly benevolent and generous, particularly Germany, which obviously is right next door to Poland.

And that didn’t happen. Everyone else except us, Ireland and Sweden, imposed transitional controls. So between that, a booming economy in the 2000s and the popularity of the English language, we rapidly became the most popular destination for migrants from these new EU member states. In fact, more people arrived in the first month than the government had been projecting would arrive in the first year.

Edmonds: That’s amazing. What numbers are we talking about?

Ford: We’re talking about millions. In fact, the numbers have recently been revised up by the Office for National Statistics. One of the great scandals was instantly in the politics and policy of migration is the appalling quality of most of our statistics about this, we really don’t know very well who’s coming and going. At the time, the main survey we had to capture who was coming into Britain was called the International Passenger Survey, which as the name suggests, is flights arriving. But it mainly conducted its surveys, you’d have the clipbo