WE are all Africans. If this comes as a nasty shock to any pure-bred Brits you know, break it to them gently. Their DNA is almost exactly the same as everybody else throughout the world.

And, in as far as there are differences, they are as likely to vary as much between near neighbours in any part of the world as they are to be different from anyone on the other side of the world. And not by a very significant amount.

Of course, for our pure-bred Brit inclined to vote for Reform UK, the Tories or Keir Starmer’s Labour, where the policy differences are hardly more differentiated than the DNA of British voters, such facts, even when acknowledged, don’t change much in their mode of thought.

Fascinating new evidence is modifying the idea that we all originated from somewhere in eastern or southern Africa. A more nuanced view exists which suggests that Africa as a whole was the place where human beings evolved to what we are today.

A new paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that the evidence is that Homo sapiens emerged within the interactions of many different population groups across Africa often isolated from each other, connecting only occasionally.

Professor Eleanor Scerri, the lead author of the paper, says: “Fossil, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the idea of Homo sapiens evolving in just one population in a single region is too simplistic.”

It would be infinitely more diverting to dive down into the Natural History Museum’s treatment of this question than deal with the ugly manifestation of the wholly unscientific ideas about immigration which permeate mass consciousness in our country — but then the features editor of this newspaper has evolved into a strict guardian of topicality.

So, to put it bluntly, we are all migrants in the sense that our ancestors moved here from somewhere else.

I like to think that the reason why so many different peoples (in no particular order), Celts, Saxons, Angles, Romans (including black Roman soldiers from what we now call Sudan) Franks, Roma, various kinds of Germans, Mediterranean Jews and more recently, Huguenots, East European Jews and many more, came here is because that small sleeve of water we call the English Channel made Britain so enticing.

However, we now learn that once we were connected to the rest of our continent by a strip of land the weather forecast calls Dogger Bank. So for most of our existence, we were just like any other bit of continental Europe, distinguished only by weather marginally less wet than Ireland’s.

What makes migration such a toxic topic is capitalism. Sure, the Romans met with resistance, but actually life improved substantially once they were established. And when Britain became part of France — or perhaps it was France becoming part of Britain — it took a while to homogenise the people who spoke the different languages which now seamlessly made English the new lingua franca.

If it was capitalism, and its ugly twin sister colonialism, which made migration such a big thing, and it is imperialism which makes it an ugly thing.

Between 1815 and 1914, 10 million British people emigrated to other people’s countries in a disastrously successful project to make them our imperial subjects, and of these places only the nearest supplied much in the way of immigrants into Britain. On the other hand, the British diaspora — people with a direct and relatively recent family connection with the United Kingdom — is estimated to be around 200 million.

And the reason why the Irish came here is largely because of what colonial Britain did to Ireland. The Great Famine drove a million Irish here and more elsewhere, mostly across the seas. Consequently, one in ten Brits have Irish grandparents.

Throughout the 19th century, the biggest group of migrants in this country were Germans. We should not be surprised at the intimate links. Half our language is mostly German in origin and our royal family are Germans.

So intimate were the economic, political and cultural links between 19th-century Germany and Britain. The German diplomat Herman Muthesius returned home and, in 1903, published the first edition of his Der Englische Haus. This provided a compelling picture of the way the “English” lived and Muthesius was instrumental in fostering a cultural exchange that was a progenitor of a modern movement in design and architecture that owed much to the influence of William Morris and the arts and crafts movement.

Our ruling class is promiscuously unpatriotic. Rather than a pure-bred English or even Welsh or Scottish monarch, it habitually seeks out foreigners. In June 1688 six English nobles and a bishop, representative of both Tory and Whig elements in the ruling class and keen to get rid of the Catholic King James II, wrote to William II, Prince of Orange asking him to pop over and become king.

In fact, these lines are written 100 metres from 18 Court Street in Faversham, where the fleeing James II, who had been captured by patriotic fishermen of this Cinque Port, was detained.

The salient constitutional point arising from this issue is that who becomes head of state is determined by the decisive forces in the ruling class and not by lineage but is only ratified by the decision of the House of Commons.

German migrants to Britain were economic migrants in the sense that the intimate economic relations between declining imperial Britain and the recently united German state were not yet openly antagonistic. Hidden now by a century of inter-imperialist rivalry, the cultural impact is veiled but its persistence and permanence were a precursor to the overwhelmingly positive effects that successive waves of 20th and 21st-century migratory flows have engendered.

In the last decade of the 19th century, an influx of Jewish refugees fleeing the persecutions and privations of the Russian empire (ruled by the first cousin of both our king and the kaiser) came here and by the eve of the second world war had increased to 380,000, including refugees from Nazism.

There were a lot of population movements due to the war and we shouldn’t forget that the victory over fascism delivered 120,000 Poles who found it inexpedient to return to a socialist Poland. These, at the initiative of Labour home secretary Chuter Ede, were joined by about 35,000 Ukrainians among whom were 8,500 veterans of the Nazis’ 14th Waffen SS 1st Galician Division.

Presently, or since 2011, 336,000 more non-British nationals moved here than departed. This is a big change from earlier periods.

In the last half of the last century, most migrants to Britain were from the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica and Trinidad, and other Commonwealth countries like India, Pakistan, and Cyprus. This was the result of government policy by both Tory and Labour administrations designed to fill gaps in the manufacturing, public service and NHS labour force during post-war reconstruction.

Since Britain joined the Common Market, and its transformation into the EU at the end of the last century and until Brexit, immigration into Britain was facilitated by the “right” to free movement of goods, capital, services and labour.

In the first decade of the 21st century, about 70 per cent of the population increase was due to foreign-born immigration. By 2013 nearly one in eight of the population were foreign born.

The 2011 census recorded 137,862 French-born people living in Britain, the 2021 census revealed there were 276,669 Italians. Last year there were 600,000 Poles here. In 2022 there were over 50,000 Czechs, slightly more Slovaks and nearly 200,000 Spanish.

But it is not one-way traffic. Today there are just under a million Brits living in the EU and 1.3 million in the US. These flows of people in and out of Britain are an inevitable fact of life in the globalised capitalist world.

When the decisive elements in the political class and the media present the relatively small numbers of boat people arriving here as the principal issue it is a political trick to divert attention from the fact that most of the migratory flows through our borders are directly sanctioned by government in response to imperatives laid down by the employing class to meet their labour market preferences.

A measure of media and ruling-class hypocrisy is the different treatment given to, for example, Ukrainians fleeing the war or people who find the re-establishment of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong uncongenial. These are offered safe passage and help finding jobs, while other refugees are refused the right to work.

A big part of the campaign to divert people from the illusion that Reform UK has the answer to the problems of living through a capitalist crisis lies in making it clear that only a planned socialist economy can end the anarchy of the labour market under capitalism.

When people start to ask why the fifth-most wealthy economy cannot train enough doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and researchers, and makes a state policy of robbing the global South of these specialists, then we will be making progress.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.