Page - 140 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

140 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings It depends what they mean by “best”. The migrants probably have to be more adventurous than the average person. Historical studies of certain migration movements in the past by people who went from England to the United States – which was not the United States yet – in the seventeenth century, show that migrants were more literate than average. And that might mean that it was easier for them to imagine an alternative way of life. As for statistics today, the Poles who have arrived in the UK over the last two decades were more highly skilled than the average level in Poland, and more highly educated. I think half of them have been to university – not half the Polish population has yet been to university. So, that may be what you mean by “best”.5 Philosopher Bernard Andrieu reminded of the potential of skills and knowledge that arriving people carry with them, formal professional skills, but also informal skills in mobilities due to having tra- velled under excruciating conditions.6 Do we have evidence of skilled migrants from the past? There have been major skilled migrations, the most famous one in English history, I think, was when the French Protestants arrived in the late seventeenth century. There were many silk workers and people who made clocks and watches, there were silversmiths, and these were highly skilled workers who were very much in demand and made a contribution to the British pre-industrial economy which was going to become industrial a century later. Of course it was a skill drain from France, and people knew this at the time, just as when Spain expelled the Moriscos, the people of Arab origin (although they were officially Christian), 300’000 of them were expelled at the beginning of the seventeenth century. And people were aware that this was to be going to be bad for Spain economically. But the Spanish in the early seventeenth and the French in the late seventeenth century officially said that this was a price worth paying, because we are a Christian country. There is also the struggle, the competition for employment. The French who arrived in London in the seventeenth century and the Irish who arrived in the nineteenth century were unpopular among other people trying to practice the same crafts. Highly skilled immigrants were of course a threat for established professions; if you were an English silk-weaver you did not welcome all these highly skilled Frenchmen. 5 See echo from an OECD survey, mentioning “One education source said: ‘Polish parents who come to the UK say they cannot believe how easy the national curriculum is compared to what they are used to.’” Steven Swinford, ‘Poland is leading the way for England’s schools’, in The Telegraph, January 19, 2015, URL <http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11355797/Poland-is-leading-the-way-for-Englands-schools-Ed- ucation-Secretary-says.html> [accessed 2016-01-16] ; “The stock of the migrant population more than doubled from 1993 to 2013. […] India is the most common country of birth among the foreign-born, but Poland tops the list of foreign citizens in the UK.”, says The Migration Observatory at University of Oxford, URL <http://www. migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migrants-uk-overview> [accessed 2016-01-16] 6 Bernard Andrieu. ‘La migration des savoirs des migrants’, VEI Enjeux 123(12/2000), pp. 118-126.