Jack Crangle's Migrants, Immigration and Diversity in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland: British, Irish or “Other”? is ground-breaking: it is the first book-length study of immigrants in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. Crangle has done a great job of locating archival sources for future scholars to utilize. He has also interviewed a range of first- and second-generation immigrants and civil society actors who have worked with immigrants. He uses those sources to examine the complexity of experiences of immigrant communities in a region beset with entrenched sectarian divisions.
Although Northern Ireland is formally part of the United Kingdom, scholars have tended to treat the study of the United Kingdom as if it is an island nation, Britain. Northern Ireland, if it is mentioned at all, is usually treated as an anomaly—a place apart, not an integral part of the United Kingdom. The study of immigration to the United Kingdom has, as Crangle notes, tended to be focused on England. Migrants, Immigration and Diversity is part of a developing four-nation approach to immigration in the United Kingdom that attempts to extend research on immigration beyond London and postindustrial cities in England. It joins works such as the edited collections by Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans, and Paul O'Leary, eds. A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales (2015), and Tom M. Devine and Angela McCarthy, eds., New Scots: Scotland's Immigrant Communities Since 1945 (2018).
Crangle states that his core aim in writing the book was “to formulate how the lived experiences of thousands of twentieth-century migrants and minorities can help us understand the place of ‘others’ in Northern Ireland's bifurcated society” (203). He pursues this goal by looking at four case studies of specific immigrant communities: Italians, Indians, Chinese, and Vietnamese. These roughly correspond to different waves of immigration to Northern Ireland: Italians at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Indians during the post–World War 2 Windrush period, Chinese during the 1970s, and Vietnamese from 1979.
Including Italians allows Crangle to highlight that racialization of immigrants is not dependent on skin color or other visible phenotypical markers of difference. It also enables Crangle to illustrate ways in which changing contexts had an impact on perceptions of immigrant communities. He notes that the high proportion of fascist sympathizers among the Italian immigrants endeared them to many Ulster Unionists in the 1920s and 1930s, which quickly turned to hostility when Britain and Italy were on opposing sides in World War 2. Similarly, their so-called foreignness enabled many Italian immigrants to locate themselves outside of the sectarian divide, but with the outbreak of the Troubles their Catholic-ness became more prominent and more problematic.
Crangle's interviews with first- and second-generation immigrants from India paints a picture of a highly educated community in which endogenous marriage and family relationships have been very important. This community, as portrayed by his interviewees, has been highly gendered with arranged marriages and male breadwinners as the norm. During the Troubles, this insularity enabled the Indian community to inhabit spaces in the interstices of Northern Irish society. This insularity, however, is breaking down. Crangle explores some of the intergenerational tensions experienced by the Indian community as there has been growing secularization and exogenous marriage among the second and third generations.
Prior to twenty-first-century immigration from Eastern Europe, the Chinese had been the largest immigrant community in Northern Ireland. This immigration began shortly before the emergence of the civil rights movement that sparked a sectarian state clampdown, which itself provoked the outbreak of sustained violent conflict. Chinese immigration to the region, however, continued despite the war. Crangle notes that, unlike in the rest of the United Kingdom, there was no institutional state support for these immigrants. Cultural diversity policy, to the extent that it existed at all, was focused on managing the sectarian divide. There was no state support for languages other than English or for teaching English as a second language. The United Kingdom's Race Relations policy did not extend to Northern Ireland, in part out of fear that Catholics would used it to challenge sectarian state practices. Crangle identifies some shifts in the Chinese community. He notes, for example, the shift in immigrants: previously they were from rural Hong Kong and then they came from urban mainland China. This shift has also been associated with a shift from employment patterns: first in food services, then professional occupations. The Chinese community, like its Indian counterpart, is also experiencing intergenerational shifts, with younger generations much more likely to identify as Northern Irish.
The Vietnamese, unlike the other immigrant groups Crangle examines, came to Northern Ireland as refugees. Crangle notes that part of the motivation for bringing refugees from one conflict zone to another was a utopian hope that their presence might help to overcome sectarian insularity. In practice the refugees were dumped in areas of severe deprivation and largely left to fend for themselves. Many moved to places in England with ethnic community support networks, and many of those who remained became assimilated into the local Chinese community (the refugees who were accepted into the United Kingdom were ethnic Chinese who had been crammed into camps in Hong Kong).
Crangle's study enriches understanding of immigrants in twentieth-century Northern Ireland. This reviewer, however, feels that his use of immigrants to “help to understand the place of ‘others’ in a bifurcated society” (203) suffers from a limited conception of immigrants and “others.” Northern Ireland is a bifurcated society, but Crangle, like many other scholars of the region, tends to treat the Catholic/Irish/Nationalist and Protestant/British/Unionist communities as monoliths. Intracommunity diversity, however, has been as much a feature of Northern Irish society as intercommunity strife has. If Crangle had included immigrants from the rest of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and people from Northern Ireland who emigrated and then returned, he might have been able to gain an even richer understanding of the place of “others” in a bifurcated society. Migrants, Immigration and Diversity, however, makes that task a lot easier for subsequent researchers.
