Britain's shameful past holds a vital message about immigration culture today

Deplorable attitudes to refugees failed to stop solidarity across the divides

- Kenan Malik

East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town", foreigners "swamping whole areas once populated by English people". The "substitution of a foreign for an English population" has created "increasing bitterness of feeling".

No, not Robert Jenrick or Nigel Farage, but William Evans-Gordon, the Tory MP for Stepney, fulminating in 1903 against the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. "Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders," he told parliament.

Evans-Gordon was a founder of the British Brothers' League (BBL), a powerful anti-immigration movement with the slogan "England for the English", and the driving force behind the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to keep out Jewish refugees.

Where previous arrivals had "merged in the population", Evans-Gordon wrote in The Alien Immigrant, "the Hebrew colony" formed a "permanently distinct block - a race apart", refusing to "assimilate" but coming "like an army of locusts, eating up the English inhabitants or driving them out".

They brought with them "colonies of foreign crime". In certain courts in London, "English was hardly heard".

According to Evans-Gordon: "The proportion of aliens who live by vice is inordinately high". They indulged in "depraved" sexual crimes, "which, but for them, would hardly be known in this country".

Evans-Gordon's themes echo across the century. Arguments about populations being replaced, denunciations of asylum seekers as "invaders", the insistence that migrants are unassimilable, accusations of mass criminality and depravity, are all wearily familiar.