Blast from the past - the last time we experienced mass migration was before World War 1

Migration of eastern and southern Europeans contributed to Britain leaving the EU - in part because it was the biggest mass migration we'd experienced since world war two. You have to go back to the last period of globalisation, in the late 19th century to see something similar.

The late 19th century was the second period of globalisation (the first being the discoveries of the new world in the 15th and 16th centuries along with sea routes to India and colonisation of much of the world). By the 1870's continental europe was industrialising fast too, and the USA had already followed Britain's lead in creating a big manufacturing base.

Britain, at the head of a vast empire, practiced pure free trade. No tariffs on anything at all and no restrictions on free movement. But it had no welfare state for these policies to become a drain on the taxpayer. However, it did mean that the poor working classes of Britain were subject to competition.

Still, all went well till Europe destabalised. First Bismarck unified Germany by force with a "blood and iron" policy. Then he attacked France. The consequence of this was to plunge Europe into what became known as "the Long Depression" which lasted 20 years. Lots of desperate Germans and French people streamed westward. In the meanwhile the Tsar was harassing Jews, who also started streaming westwards, and Italy was forcibly unified, causing massive unemployment in Southern Italy, a place that had been stable for centuries but now plunged into desperate recession.

All of these things caused massive migration. If you could afford the ticket for a sea passage, you went to the United States (which still allowed all comers at this point). If you couldn't afford that, you went to Britain.

So Britain in the late 19th century was clogged with newcomers streaming in.

What is interesting is how differently the migrants groups were treated.

The French and Italians were welcomed. France had invented photography in the mid 19th century, and though the practice spread fast, fashionable England was convinced that French photographers were the best, so migrants from France either set up photographic studies themselves or found jobs in them working for other French migrants. The French bistro was also fashionable - so you had a lot of restaurants in London serving French food, complete with French chefs and waiters - and if they couldn't find French waiters they hired Cockneys who pretended to be French while serving food, so that the customer got the proper French experience.

The Italians brought with them an exciting new food, icecream, and set up icecream shops all over Britain, which the British enthusiastically visited.

The key point about both the French and Italian migrants is that they weren't competing head-to-head with the British working classes. Instead they'd created niches providing new services which Britain lacked.

The German and Eastern European migrants didn't fare so well. They tried to get jobs in factories and were in immediate competition with the working classes for jobs and homes.

Keir Hardie, the Scottish-born leader of the Labour party argued for a ban on immigration. In 1899 he told a House of Commons select committe that, "It would be much better for Scotland if those 1,500 were compelled to remain there and let the foreigners be kept out... Dr Johnson said God made Scotland for Scotchmen, and I would keep it so". He's known for his insults towards migrants claiming they carried the "black death".

It wasn't just Scots who were angry, Londoners were convinced that the foreign migrants were responsible for a wave of crime (and later it would be proved by DNA that Jack the Ripper was an eastern european migrant called Aron Mordke Kozminski).

The archives of the Rothschild family show great alarm at the hostility rising, especially towards Jews. The Rothschild ladies controlled the family charities and sprang into action, setting up schools, community centres "to stop men hanging around street corners and alarming people", tenement buildings with sanitation that they opened to all comers (not just migrant Jews) - about 1400 of these buildings still exist in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Southwark and Barnet and are still administered by the Rothschild family as charitable housing for people with special needs.

But despite the tremedous activity on their part to relieve the pressures, the Rothschilds got accused of attracting migrants. Why would a migrant stop in Germany or the Netherlands if they knew that by coming to Britain they could get a home? (This is the origin of the argument that Britain attracts migrants by being too kind, and it's persevered for a century, only now the attraction is the welfare state not Rothschild charity).

Finally the Liberal government stepped in and passed the first laws on immigration in 1905, and introduced passports for the first time. The Americans too legislated to control migration and started the Ellis Island system to control the flow.

With no new people coming in, things stated to calm down and existing migrants started to settle - but the great assimilating event was World War 1, where the German and Eastern European migrants hastily anglicised their names and stopped speaking their own languages in the street or at home, a process that was so thorough that their great-grandchildren are often unaware of their migrant background.

There are echoes from the past in the present day. Europeans have been gravely insulted by Britain leaving the EU to stop migration arguing that surely it's better to have white migrants like themselves instead of non-white migrants from the Empire - this argument sounds good to a European because they have a race-based society. But Britain is a class based socoety.

As long as you are not competing with the working classes, you are accepted. The Ugandan Asians (predominantly Hindu) set up businesses when they came to Britain, mainly corner shops where they provided a service to the general community at a time when supermarkets were closed early (they were careful to label all their produce in English and stock things Brits would want to buy, from baked beans to marmite, toilet rolls, nappies and so on). They didn't collect benefits, they paid tax, they provided a service to the people in the areas they were in and they didn't compete with the working classes - therefore they've been accepted as "good immigrants".

Bangladeshi migrants too tend to set up Indian restaurants and takeaways, where they work as chefs and waiters - again providing a service to the local community much like the French a century earlier. And crucially they are not competing with the working classes.

Other migrants from South Asia have been doctors in the NHS (Indian doctors are the biggest minority in the NHS). And migrants from the United States and Australia have tended to work in the City of London as bankers - again not competing with the white working class.

The wave of migration from eastern europe however did go head to head with the British working classes in factories, construction work, skilled trades like plumbing. And their presence depressed wages, much as happened a century ago with the eastern european migration into late Victorian Britain.

And as before there has been a fierce reaction to them, this time by ballot.