The main focus of today's lecture is recent immigration patterns. But in order to provide you with some background, I will begin by briefly outlining the history of immigration to the United Kingdom during the twentieth century. So ... if we look back firstly to the period before World War I, we can see that there was a certain amount of immigration to the UK, but it was comparatively small in relation to the rest of the century. During the first and second world wars, however, numbers began to rise as Belgians, Germans and other Europeans fled their countries in order to escape the conflict. There were some controls in place at this time so not all of the people who sought to emigrate were successful. It was during the post-war period that we first saw a dramatic increase in the immigration rate. British industries needed labour in order to recover from the economic losses they endured during the war, and this attracted many workers from other European countries such as Poland and the Ukraine. Britain also opened its doors to immigrants from all the countries that were part of the British Empire, such as India or Jamaica, by passing the British Nationality Act in 1948. Workers from these countries were now allowed to move freely to Britain in order to live and work for the first time without need of a visa. By the 1960s concerns about immigration led the British government to begin legislating in order to control immigration. However, this legislation had little real effect and numbers remained high with around 72,000 Commonwealth immigrants arriving every year. Numbers dropped slightly in the 1980s due to more restrictive legislation, but started to rise again in the 1990s.