Postwar Black and Asian migration challenged settled British identity as a new phenomenon.

Evidence

There has been a “black” presence in Britain since the sixteenth century and an Asian presence since the eighteenth. But the type and scale of migration into Britain from the nonwhite global periphery which has seriously challenged the settled notion of British identity and posed “the multicultural question” is a post–Second World War, postcolonial phenomenon. Historically, it began with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, bringing returning Caribbean volunteer servicemen and the first civilian Caribbean migrants leaving the depressed economies of the region in search of a better life. The flow was quickly reinforced from the Caribbean, then from the Asian subcontinent and the Asians expelled from East Africa, together with Africans and others from the Third World, until the late 1970s, when immigration legislation effectively closed the door. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Windrush (1948) as the anchor date for postcolonial migration and ‘the multicultural question’ as a post-Second World War phenomenon — a factual anchor the reader will need in later Islamophobia readings that locate when ‘the Muslim’ enters the British racialized imaginary.
• XREF: The 1970s closure through immigration legislation resonates with the reader’s prior reading on institutions and trade law — law as gatekeeping mechanism for membership in the national community.