British Sri Lankans - History - 20th Century

20th Century

The UK was the first country with established immigration from Sri Lanka and took in many of the early Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan immigrants can be divided into three types of immigrants that have come to the UK.

The first type came from the 1950s to the 1980s the Sri Lankan diaspora consisted of a very settled group of people who followed a migration model of a single journey with a settled home at the end of it. Many of these people who came are well-educated and very well off economically and have become established in British society. During the 1960s, understaffing in the UK’s National Health Service opened up the opportunity for many Sri Lankans to become doctors and consultants; others managed to secure other white-collar jobs.

The second type of Sri Lankan immigrants consists of mostly young men who are less educated and often traumatized by their experiences from the war zones and remain on the fringes of British society. These immigrants would have left Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The third type is a smaller but growing one, which is mainly the young people living in the second or third generation in Great Britain, who are comparatively well-educated and have experienced today’s democratic pluralism and a more middle-class British society.

Before 1983, when the Civil War started, social spaces for a Sri Lankan elite existed, there were hardly any ethnic boundaries and all ethnicities attended Sri Lankan High Commission receptions and the frequent intra-school sports competitions organized by Sri Lankan schools alumnae. During that time the public perceived the Sri Lankan community as one of the most successful immigrant communities in the UK. Especially during the 1970s, political organization increased among both Tamils and Sinhalese.

In the 1960s a larger community of Sri Lankans developed when they migrated to the UK for employment opportunities. In the 1980s with the start of the Civil War and a result of persecution many Sri Lankans fled to the UK to seek asylum.