‘We want new settlers of British stock’

Abstract

This chapter concerns official planning for post-war migration in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia. Promoters of migration in all three nations sought to use the wartime migration of British children and service personnel to encourage white migration to Southern Rhodesia, South Africa and the other settler colonies of the British Empire. By contrast, British officials sought to encourage Black service personnel serving in the United Kingdom to return to the Caribbean, reflecting racialised understandings of who was a desirable migrant. The debates and discussions surrounding these plans reveal the ways in which policy makers, voluntary organisations and individuals perceived both white British migration and its importance in the emerging Commonwealth. They also reveal, in the intense concern about the potential for Black service personnel to remain in the United Kingdom after the war, the importance of race in perceptions about migration and an official concern about Commonwealth migrants of colour well before the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948.