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Immigration controls in the early 20th century made it difficult for people to settle in Britain. One group which did manage to put down roots were immigrant seamen hired to work on merchant ships. This was a result of many white seamen being called to serve in the armed forces during World War One and World War Two. Others included West African stowaways on cargo ships.

After World War Two, a mass immigration of people coming to work in Britain began. Many of the early arrivals were from the West Indies, South Asia and Cyprus. The most famous arrival was of people from the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica and Trinidad, on the ship Empire Windrush in 1948. This is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the first arrival of black people in Britain.

As the UK economy picked up and then boomed in the late 1950s and 1960s, migrants from India, East and West Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana and many other Commonwealth countries came to work in the textile factories of the North of England and the engineering factories of the Midlands. During the 1980s and 1990s many people from countries outside the Commonwealth or the European Union, such as Colombia, Morocco and the Philippines, came to fill low-paid jobs as waiters, cleaners and chambermaids.

Under the European Union’s ‘free movement of workers’, hundreds of thousands of women and men from EU countries came to the UK in the 21st century. The largest number of immigrants came from Poland and they worked mainly in the service sector.