Labour Migration In Britain: A Snapshot Of The Present Situation In “It's A Free World” By Ken Loach

From ancient times, human behaviours and attitudes have revealed a strong vocation for migration and movement. Migration also characterized relevant periods in history, such as the huge movement of black people from Africa to America in 1600 and the flow of 50 million Europeans moving to the North and South America and to Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Our time is a time of people in movement and of movements of people. Whether temporary or permanent, free or forced, national or international, migration always involve an emigration phase, when an individual leaves the homeland environment, and an immigration phase, when he or she tries to integrate into the host society.

However, migration is not and has never been a straightforward issue. Contemporary European migration traces back to the nineteenth century, when nationalism emerged and became a dominant ideology and the liberal policies were criticised in the receiving countries: consequently, the first forms of immigration control began to spread all over the world and exacerbated during the two World Wars.
In the 1950s, this new trend emerged completely: Europe, a centre of emigration until then, became the prominent destination of migrants.

The reason of this shift is the economic recovery in post-war Europe that required foreign labour, besides local workforce. Therefore, there was a wave of migrants going to North-West Europe, which contributed to transform the existing societies into the intercultural and interconnected entities in which we are living right now.
This process occurred along with the development of very powerful mass media and of social behaviours such as consumerism. These phenomena of liberalization and integration of markets affected the majority of Western countries, especially at the level of culture: the fixed pattern that previously affected a given culture has now disappeared, allowing it to go beyond national borders.

The aim of the present work is to assess these events according to the point of view of both the sending and receiving country, starting from a general overview on the phenomenon of migration, with its causes and different forms.
Then I will focus on the difficult relation between immigration and labour in Britain, with a statistical, social and political analysis. A detailed account of the British society is fundamental to fully understand the film on which is based the third chapter and the whole dissertation: It's a Free World directed by the English film and television director Ken Loach.
The film gives an extraordinary snapshot of the dramatic situation of labour migration in Britain, and is the starting point for further observation about the socio-political topics anticipated in the second chapter.