Immigration in the United Kingdom

Windrush Generation
Introduction
After the end of WWII, the British were faced with a severe labor shortage. There were simply not enough workers to tend to the work needed in England. The war had wrought considerable destruction and the solution, it seemed at the time, was to import labor. Immigrants from the Caribbean countries, such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados were invited to the UK between the years of 1948 and 1971 to help fill the labor shortage. They arrived at the ship the MV Empire Windrush, which is where the name “Windrush Generation” comes from.[footnoteRef:2] As a result of the 1971 Immigration Act, people living in the UK were given the right to stay. However, in recent years, immigration laws have become more restrictive, and it is now estimated that nearly 50,000 long-term residents in the UK are at risk of being deported—many of them elderly. This is particularly problematic for the Windrush Generation, as “many of the Windrush generation had arrived as children on their parents' passports. And although they have lived in Britain for many decades—paying taxes and insurance—they never formally became British citizens.” This paper will discuss the issue of the Windrush Generation from a historical and contemporary vantage point to show what happened and what remains to be done. [2: Al Jazeera, The UK’s Windrush Generation, 2018. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/uk-windrush-generation-scandal-180418074648878.html]
The Scandal
In 2018, more than 80 cases involving members of the Windrush Generation were reported in which the immigrants and their children, some of whom were British born, were wrongfully denied rights and deported by the UK Home Office.[footnoteRef:3] These were people who had been living in the UK for decades and whose residency was legally permitted by the 1971 Immigration Act and whose citizenship had been declared by the 1948 British Nationality Act. Under PM May, the UK enacted a “hostile environment policy” to crackdown on illegal immigration.[footnoteRef:4] Since voters voted for Brexit years ago, there has been a general consensus that the motive was in part related to a desire to separate England from the open borders policy of the EU. By cracking down on immigration, Parliament believed it could potentially satisfy the public and perhaps lessen the demand for a hard or no-deal Brexit. However, what happened was that British citizens ended up being rounded up and deported to a land they had not seen in decades and that some had never seen in their whole lives. It quickly became known as the Windrush Scandal, and British leaders have since been reeling in an attempt to save face. [3: Kevin Rawlinson, Windrush: 11 people wrongly deported have died, The Guardian, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/12/windrush-11-people-wrongly-deported-from-uk-have-died-sajid-javid] [4: May Bulman, The human impact of Theresa May’s hostile environment policies, The Independent, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hostile-environment-policy-theresa-may-migrants-windrush-a8315806.html]
Thanks to the efforts of Caribbean diplomats, the revelations of what was happening to the Windrush Generation raised enough attention in the public to lead to changes in the administration. The efforts particularly of Guy Hewitt, the High Commissioner for Barbados to the United Kingdom helped to bring awareness of this issue to the public.[footnoteRef:5] People of the Windrush Generation like Paulette Wilson, who at 61 years of age “spent a week at a detention centre and was nearly deported to Jamaica, despite having been in Britain for 50 years” for the first time were having their stories told.[footnoteRef:6] She was one of the lucky ones, however; she lived. Some who were deported were not so lucky. It was like having the rug pulled out from under one’s entire life for many of the Windrush Generation. Many of them had been children, and they had received no documents upon arrival—and since their arrival had been legal they had no idea they needed to apply for a certain status. As far as they were concerned, they were legal British citizens. [5: Guy Hewitt, Winning the Windrush Battle, Chatham House, 2018. https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/winning-windrush-battle] [6: Al Jazeera, The UK’s Windrush Generation, 2018. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/uk-windrush-generation-scandal-180418074648878.html]
As the stories began to emerge, members of Parliament began to posture and condemn. The finger pointing began. The apologies ensued. The damage, however, was done for many. Some had lost jobs, some had seen their health deteriorate as a result of being denied treatment. Some had been deported. Some had died, destitute and alone, having been kicked out of the country they had called home for the whole of their lives. The stories came and came and finally the British government had nothing to do, nothing to say. What was done was done.
The History
The British Nationality Act of 1948 made it possible for the Windrush Generation to come over. It was an Act that granted citizenship to people of UK colonies and allowed them to come to the UK to live and work and settle. If one had been born in a British Colony, under this Act, one was to be considered British. The British government used this Act to help drive a campaign to attract workers from the Caribbean. The war had ended and jobs needed to be filled. The people of the British colonies were viewed as prime candidates to fill those spots. Thus at the request and encouragement of the British government, they came to the UK to live, work and settle.
The individuals who came from the Caribbean had no need to apply for citizenship status: it had already been granted them by the British Nationality Act of 1948. They were British citizens. The Windrush Generation of immigrants were, in effect, not to be considered immigrants but as full-fledged British citizens who had every right to be in the UK.[footnoteRef:7] They came, worked, lived, and were British. Their children went to British schools and grew up to be elderly. [7: BBC, Windrush Generation, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43792411]
Then the rising tide of anger against the immigration wave coming out of the Middle East thanks to the endless wars sponsored by the West drove the British government to begin cracking down on illegal immigrants who could not prove their status with the proper documents. The problem for the Windrush Generation was that they had never needed nor been given any documents so could not actually prove that they were there legally. It was a major mistake on the part of the British government. In all the bureaucratic red tape of its own inefficiency it had no way of knowing who was Windrush (legal) and who was not.
The Home Office recently reported its error and identified what it was doing to correct the mistake:
This issue came to light because measures introduced in recent years to make sure only those with a legal right to live here can access things like NHS treatment and rented accommodation, meaning people must now be able to prove their status. Having not previously needed documentation they have now found themselves without any way of proving their status today. All that these people require is a simple card which is available from the Home Office.[footnoteRef:8] [8: Home Office, Immigration Status of the Windrush Generation, 2018. https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2018/04/15/immigration-minister-op-ed-in-the-voice/]
The Home Office went on to urge all members of the Windrush Generation to apply so that their status could be confirmed and their status appropriately documented to prevent anything of the sort from happening again.
The Windrush Generation was assured by the Home Office that they would not need to provide any documentation (as they would not have any to give anyway) and that all they would need to do would be to help the Home Office verify their status by “building the picture” of the lives in the UK, by telling the Home Office where their children went to school, where they worked, lived, and so on, for the past few decades. Basically, the Windrush Generation would have to give an historical account of their time in the UK since the 1970s or earlier—and then everything would be fine.
Why It Happened and Why It Matters
The Home Office wanted the public to know when the scandal broke that it was by no means intending to target Caribbean people. It had all been an honest mistake that only a bureaucratic state could make. The Home Office Immigration Minister stated on the record, “My main priority here is to dispel the myth that this Government is clamping down on Commonwealth citizens – particularly those from the Caribbean – who have built a life here. This is just not true. As next week’s meeting of Commonwealth leaders demonstrates, we need to work together to make a better life for everyone.”[footnoteRef:9] The only problem was that it had already made life a living hell for so many members of the Windrush Generation—simply because it had failed to take their stories into account in the first place. [9: Home Office, Immigration Status of the Windrush Generation, 2018. https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2018/04/15/immigration-minister-op-ed-in-the-voice/]
But why did it happen in the first place? Why did the Home Secretary (Theresa May, at the time, prior to being England’s PM) enact a “hostile environment policy”? The reason is that since 2010, a Conservative Party Manifesto had promised that England would soon make it so hard for illegal immigrants to live in the UK that they would leave voluntarily. In a UK that had voted to leave the EU primarily because of all the immigration that was washing over the continent, the desire among many was to see the immigration stopped. But these tactics were fierce and hardline. As the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Ed Davey reported, “The Conservatives seem hellbent on creating a hostile environment for anyone not from the UK. These scare tactics should be beneath any civilised government.”[footnoteRef:10] The reason the scare tactics were put in place in England was the same reason they were put in place in the U.S. following the election of Donald Trump with ICE: a wave of populism and nationalism had risen up to counter the wave of unchecked immigration that was happening. The public wanted its political representatives to get tough on immigration—and that is precisely what they began to do in England. As Amelia Hill noted, “the tactics, however, are multiplying: landlords are now required to carry out checks on tenants’ immigration status. Hospitals, community interest companies and charities receiving NHS funds must conduct ID checks on patients before treatment in order to bill them if they are found not eligible for NHS care. From January, banks and building societies will be compelled to carry out immigration checks on the owners of 70m current accounts.”[footnoteRef:11] Caught in the midst of all this crackdown were the members of the Windrush Generation. They had no immigration papers, no documentation to show that they were legal citizens. All they could do was tell their story—how they had come over as part of the Windrush Generation after the war, how the British Nationality Act had paved the way for their migration. That was there story: there were no papers. They had been given none. And for that they were detained, cut off from medical care, removed from their jobs, and in many cases deported to a state they had never seen before. [10: Amelia Hill, Hostile Environment, The Guardian, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/28/hostile-environment-the-hardline-home-office-policy-tearing-families-apart] [11: Amelia Hill, Hostile Environment, The Guardian, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/28/hostile-environment-the-hardline-home-office-policy-tearing-families-apart]
The became outcasts in their own nation, unwanted because their ethnicity was not what officials expected to see when they thought of British citizenry. They were automatically suspected of being illegals and thus they were treated like illegals. They did not bother to check the actual facts or to even think back a little to what England’s own history had been. History is not a top-tier subject taught in most schools at this point. The citizens who work for the public are taught different things: how to manage, how to take orders, how to tow the line.
It was up to the diplomats from the Caribbean to start defending the British citizens that the British were now abusing. The entire spectacle became so absurd—foreign dignitaries standing up to defend the rights of British citizens whom the British government was trying to say were illegal immigrants—that when it all finally went public, the scorn and opprobrium heaped upon the British government was overwhelming. The Windrush Generation was finally identified as a real thing (recalling a little history helped) and the mandatory apologies were issued while the Home Office sought a way to get the Generation some proper ID cards.
All of the headache and heartache could have been spared, however. Some would say that if the Conservative Manifesto of 2010 had not been put into action so aggressively none of this would have happened. However, the problem actually goes further back than that. It goes back to 9/11 and the Bush-Blair resolution to invade the Middle East and destroy the homes and lives and infrastructure of the people living in that foreign land. Since Blair backed Bush in the bogus story of WMDs in Iraq, nothing has been the same. The world has been awash in blood and the Middle East has become a hotbed of violence. From one country to another, the wars have spread. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Yemen to Syria: so many displaced people, so much destruction. So many Syrian refugees ended up going to Europe for shelter (their cities turned into rubble thanks to bombing from the West) that European nations like Hungary and Germany and Italy and the Netherlands began to wonder if they were going to lose their national identity in the face of so much immigration. The EU refused to permit any nation to close its borders, however, and urged every state to do its humane duty and admit the refugees. No one in the EU ever questioned whether or not the bombing campaigns and endless wars in the Middle East that were creating so many refugees in the first place should be stopped. They just insisted that all borders be open, because the EU was one big happy family.
Englanders had had enough by then. They wanted their nation back and they wanted their sovereignty back. They voted to leave the EU mainly because of this type of situation. And they wanted the illegal immigrants in their country to leave. Because part of the British culture is its overwhelming emphasis on politeness, the British would never do something so rude as to go about and arrest its illegals the way ICE does in the U.S. But it would go about making life so untenable for people it viewed as illegal that the illegals would want to get out. That was the British way of sending the message. Unfortunately, the Windrush Generation was caught in the crosshairs. The British did not even realize, in their desire to avenge themselves and their anti-EU sentiment on the illegal immigrant population, that some among them who had been among them for decades but who looked different might nonetheless actually be citizens like them. They had forgotten their history—and their humanity.
Conclusion
The Windrush Generation came over to the UK thanks to the British Nationality Act of 1948. They were citizens of England because they had been born in the British Colonies, according to the Act. England needed laborers, so they were encouraged to come to the UK. They came aboard the Windrush, by which they received their name, and they came for more than a decade. Half a million of them came from the Caribbean and they brought their children, settled down, had more children and lived and worked and died as British citizens. And then one day, because the West had made life so miserable for people living in the Middle East that those Middle Easterners had to leave their homes and take refuge in Europe, the British decided it did not want to deal with the immigration issue anymore. So it began rounding up anyone who could not give their documents. The Windrush Generation, of course, had never had any documents—so they were lumped in with the illegals. Had the British simply taken the time to think it all through, however, a different story would have been told.
Bibliography
Al Jazeera, The UK’s Windrush Generation, 2018.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/uk-windrush-generation-scandal-180418074648878.html
BBC, Windrush Generation, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43792411
Bulman, May. The human impact of Theresa May’s hostile environment policies, The
Independent, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hostile-environment-policy-theresa-may-migrants-windrush-a8315806.html
Hewitt, Guy. Winning the Windrush Battle, Chatham House, 2018.
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/winning-windrush-battle
Hill, Amelia. Hostile Environment, The Guardian, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/28/hostile-environment-the-hardline-home-office-policy-tearing-families-apart
Home Office, Immigration Status of the Windrush Generation, 2018.
https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2018/04/15/immigration-minister-op-ed-in-the-voice/
Rawlinson, Kevin. Windrush: 11 people wrongly deported have died, The Guardian,
2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/12/windrush-11-people-wrongly-deported-from-uk-have-died-sajid-javid