RefugeesâAsylum in Europe? Daniéle Joly with Clive Nettleton and Hugh Poulton. London: Minority Rights Publications, 1992. x + 166 pp. £8.95. ISBN 1-873194-10-2 (pb)

Indeed, there was a widespread feeling among the EVWs that they were regarded as mere 'units of labour' and that insufficient efforts were being made to integrate them into the British community.The result of this disillusionment was that a quarter of the total number of EVWs recruited left Britain in the course of the 1950s (p.158).As Kay and Miles point out, from the British point of view the EVW scheme was unique in a number of respects.It marked a decisive break with the controls on immigration enshrined in the various Aliens Orders promulgated by parliament since 1905.Second, not only were such restrictions being bypassed, but for the first and only time the state itself took a direct role in recruiting foreign labour (and a Labour Government to boot!).It was, as the authors quote from a contemporary magazine source, a 'minor revolution' (p.I).Third, a sizeable proportion of the EVWs were women; that is, female migrants were being recruited as workers in their own right and not as the dependants of males.It may be, as Kay and Miles suggest, because of the very uniqueness of this scheme that the case of the EVWs has received so little attention from migration specialists.However, implicit in the title of their book is another reason for coyness on the part of scholars.The East Europeans who came to this country as volunteer workers in the late I940s do not fit neatly into either the 'political refugee' category or that of 'economic immigrant'.The DPs claimed to have political motives -fear of communism -for refusing to return to their homes.While in their camps, certainly, they were recognized as having 'political status' by the IRO.From the British point of view, however, they were simply immigrant labour, albeit recruited under rather unusual circumstances.For scholars, therefore, the EVWs have remained something of an anomaly.In that case why should we now be interested in what was, by most objective measures, a relatively modest influx?The number of East Europeans entering Britain under the EVW scheme was small when compared with subsequent influxes (indeed it was dwarfed by the number of Polish troops settling as political exiles during the same period).Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of the DP population in Germany and Austria came to this country-most found other schemes, especially in the US, Canada and Australia, more appealing.One reason for heightened interest, as the authors suggest, has been the political transformation in Eastern Europe.Another is the recent spate of attention given to recent war criminal cases involving former refugees admitted to Western states in the late 1940s.But perhaps a further reason for our interest is precisely the anomalous nature, the lack of' fit' of the EVW group at a time when the question of the economic versus the political motivations of asylum-seekers is such a burning issue of public debate.This is a well-researched and thoughtful study.It may be felt by some readers that it paints an unbelievably gloomy picture of the EVWs lost.Nevertheless, it is a valuable addition to the all too sparse literature on what was an important period in the history of British immigration.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.