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Notes -
It was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965
Mass non-Western immigration in Western Europe begins before 1965. The Empire Windrush docked in London in 1948. The first large wave of non-Western immigration to post-war France is Vietnamese who collaborated with French imperialism moving to France after Vietnamese independence in 1954, with another wave following after Algerian independence in 1962. As discussed below, the largest batch of Turkish Gastarbeiters arrived in Germany in the early 1960's.
Although there is a story about the need for cheap labour, in the British and French cases it looks like an accident rather than a well thought-out policy. The official policy of the 1945 Labour government was to discourage Caribbean immigration, but there was no way of prohibiting what was at the time domestic migration within the British Empire without causing a row that would blow up the whole Empire. The French situation is similar, with most of the early immigrants being what the French government considered to be loyal Frenchmen regardless of their skin colour.
Unlike the US, the 1960's is when the British start to restrict immigration with the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts. The UK reopens for mass immigration under Blair in 1997. Something similar happens in France 10 years later, with immigration laws being tightened in 1974 and loosened by Sarkozy.
In other words, the timings don't match up for mass immigration in Western Europe to be an extension of American policy. The wave of immigration permitted by the Hart-Cellar Act coincides with the pause in immigration in Britain and France. If you believe in the cheap labour theory of immigration politics, the explanation for this is easy - the role of cheap migrant labour in the US was filled by blacks moving north to escape Jim Crow.
Immigration began rising earlier in the 1990s under Major, didn’t it? The nadir was in the early ‘80s, but there was still substantial immigration from the third world throughout the 1975-1997 period.
The difference is that it doesn’t show on the now all important ‘net migration’ figures primarily because there was substantial emigration of 200,000+ a year through much of this period, often to Australia and elsewhere, most of which was natives.
There is a long period of negligible net foreign migration in the 70's and early 80's. There appears to be a glacial slow uptrend in both gross immigration and net foreign immigration between about 1985 and 1997, but the data is too noisy to say when it begins. See figures 1.1 and 1.2 (which should, but don't, match) in this old ONS report. The ONS have since stopped publishing immigration statistics from before 2010 because it became clear that the numbers were such poor quality - in particular they are not stock-flow consistent when cross-checked against the census. But you don't need high-quality data to see the increase after 1997, which was deliberate government policy.
I remember that non-refugee immigration was not a political issue during the Major administration - there was a tabloid panic about the number of people claiming refugee status in the immediate post-Cold War period, but the numbers peaked at about 50,000 refugee arrivals per year and about 20,000 asylum grants.
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You write well, thanks for this
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Mass migration started happening in the USA earlier, to be sure, but it was generally seen as a problem. It wasn't until the 2010s that people started pushing for open borders in practice if not in name, and this got transplanted to Europe to cause the chaotic migrations of 2014-2016.
Yeah okay, I'll buy that, open-faced 'the great replacement is a good thing' was about when you're saying
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