Sudden change or long-term consistency in refugee policy?

By Nick Powell

A horribly over-crowded train stands for hours at a Budapest station. It's packed with people displaced by war, hoping for a long journey to the country they want to reach. Eventually, the train moves off but all too soon halts again and its passengers are told that they're being transferred to a camp. 

It’s not the autumn of 2015 but the summer of 1945. Ukrainian slave labourers, taken from their homes by the Nazis, had boarded a train at Graz in Austria, with a promise from the Red Army of swift repatriation. They only got as far as the capital of Hungary before they were sent back to Austria and to a camp in Soviet-occupied Burgenland.

Today, a seemingly panicked mixture of compassion and hard-heartedness has greeted Europe's greatest refugee crisis since millions of people were resettled after the Second World War. Although the parallels with the 1940s do not end with events in Budapest.

Germany's willingness to take in so many people fleeing Syria has been linked to memories of the forcible expulsion of millions of Germans from neighbouring countries 70 years ago. Not that Germany had any choice in the matter back then, as refugees reached the occupation zones into which the country was divided.

Britain's attitude at that time set a pattern that has repeated itself over seven decades. Its post-war government wanted to encourage emigration to countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as a way of preserving the family ties that linked them with the United Kingdom. But it recognized that there would have to be immigration as well, to avoid becoming a country with not enough people of working age.

A Royal Commission was set up to advise on the problem. In those days the entire population of the British Commonwealth and Empire had the right to enter the UK. As most of them were African, Afro-Caribbean or South Asian, it was thought that encouraging them would lead to racial tension. Jewish refugees were considered similarly problematic.

After some debate, it was decided that the Irish had become fully acceptable. Of the displaced east Europeans in the British occupation zones of Germany and Austria, the Baltic nations were considered absorbable and an immigration programme was launched for them.

Doubts about the suitability of Slavic peoples, such as Poles and Ukrainians, were only over-come after the bitter winter of 1947/48 left Britain freezing and on the brink of starvation for want of enough coal miners and agricultural workers.

This turned out to be the beginning of a tradition of Britain living up to its moral responsibilities after an unseemly delay. In the 1970s Ugandan Asians, whose Indian ancestors had answered the Empire’s call for skilled workers in East Africa, were told that their British passports did not actually entitle them to enter Britain. Only when the dictator Idi Amin threated to massacre them were they allowed into the UK.

They are now generally regarded as some of the most hard-working –and most easily assimilated- immigrants to ever arrive, perhaps only equalled by the Vietnamese boat people -ethnic Chinese refugees who reached Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. That group were only let into Britain in the 1980s after much official agonising over the precedent for the population of Hong Kong itself, who might want to flee to Britain before it was handed over to China –or so it was feared.

The distinction between refugees and economic migrants has grown in importance. Tony Blair’s government tried to tighten restrictions on the right to claim asylum, as growing numbers of people were able to reach the United Kingdom and claim refugee status. Meanwhile Britain imposed no transitional limits on the freedom of movement of labour by people from the first wave of former communist countries joining the European Union.

Many in the Labour Party now regard that decision as one of their former leader’s numerous mistakes. Germany, on the other hand, imposed restrictions for as long as possible on people from its new EU neighbours, though its refugee policy has consistently been more generous than Britain’s.

Of course, all western European nations have spent the decades since the Second World War becoming more multi-ethnic. Their economic success drew in people from their former colonies, or in the case of West Germany so-called guest workers from Turkey. The communist countries had few minorities and still generally wish to keep it that way.

It was not always so. Friedrich Engels once complained about the "interminable confusion" of different nationalities in eastern Europe, with Turks, Hungarians, Romanians and Jews living within the same borders as the Slavic peoples. "Intermingled ruins of nations, which even now the ethnologist can scarcely disentangle" was how he put it.

But another disciple of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, set about the task of disentanglement with grim determination. Building on Hitler’s work, he sent millions of people fleeing across redrawn borders.

Which brings us back to those luckless Ukrainians sent back from Budapest in 1945 to a camp just inside Austria’s border with Hungary. A few escaped and fled west, the rest were processed by the Red Army as "traitors to the motherland" for failing to resist their enslavement by the Nazis. Some were shot and many more spent years in Siberia. Most eventually returned home, where they faced life-long discrimination for having "worked for Hitler".

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