Windrush Day & British Deportation Culture
Unpacking the culture of hostile environments in British immigration control measures…
What does it take to make a home, to call a place home, to be home? For many, the concept and context of home bring much-unwanted contention whilst for others it’s something often taken for granted, remaining uncontested. What happens when the place you call home threatens your freedom, takes away your right to work and access healthcare and calls you ‘illegal’? For many, the fear and humiliation of being displaced in a place that is yours are very present whilst for others it’s something that is hypothetical, remaining out of reach within the realms of reality.
73 years ago today, hundreds of people from the West Indies, disembarked the ‘MV Empire Windrush’ docked at the port in Tilbury, Essex to help plug the shortages in labour in the UK after World War II. Although this was not the first ship to bring Commonwealth citizens to the shores of the UK (e.g. The Ormonde and the SS Almanzora), it was one of those that brought one of the largest groups of people from the West Indies in 1948 - the number of passengers stated in the media back then was 492 but ship records show there were 1,027* people on board - making it a symbolic start to post-war immigration. This continued right through to the early 70’s hence why the Commonwealth citizens who came to the UK during that time are referred to as the ‘Windrush generation.
At the time, citizens of Commonwealth countries had free entry to Britain thanks to the 1948 British Nationality Act and were given the automatic right to remain and make a home for themselves. And then the 1971 Immigration Act which came into force - an attempt to dampen the growing rate of immigration and limit the number of Commonwealth citizens from being able to permanently settle in the UK; over 40,000 immigrants from the West Indies had moved to the UK by 1956 (ref). The 1971 Immigration Act did confirm though “that those people who were already present and settled in the UK when the Act came into force on 1 January 1973—i.e. those without any restriction on their leave—were entitled to stay indefinitely in the UK. It also recognised the right of wives and children to join them, a right which was retained until the Immigration Act 1988.” (ref). However, no records of those granted leave to remain were made by the Home Office in the 1970s which would prove to be one of many mistakes the Home Office made in its management of the UK’s relationship with migrants.
In 2010, it was revealed that the UK Border Agency destroyed landing cards belonging to Windrush migrants which, for some, would be the only document they had to prove when they came to the UK. So, when a ‘hostile environment policy was introduced under Theresa May’s government in 2012 as an immigration control measure which requested people prove their right to live in the UK when applying for jobs, drivers licenses, bank accounts, treatment from the NHS, housing, etc, those from the Windrush generation who had no paperwork confirming their UK citizenship were wrongfully classed as illegal immigrants sending them down deeply traumatic paths as they try to prove their right to call their home, home.
For some, it would take years before they were able to illustrate their identity using the mountain of documents - evidence of every year spent in the UK, some with fees attached - requested by the Home Office whilst trying to ensure they and their family had food to eat, a place to sleep having been denied their basic right to work, to healthcare services etc. For others, the realities of deportation gripped them hard making it impossible to ignore. Michael Braithwaite, a man who left Barbados to work in the UK back in 1961 and has lived and worked here ever since is one of many people who experienced the harshness of the hostile environment policy. Read about his story here. Similar stories of mistreatment and injustice surfaced and broke into the foreground of the media landscape from 2017 onwards resulting in what is generally known as the Windrush Scandal.
The then Home Secretary Amber Rudd issued an apology in April 2018 for the “appalling” treatment of people from the Windrush generation by the government and announced the creation of a task force and compensation scheme to facilitate those affected by the immigration control measures in obtaining their citizenship documents, waiving all fees. Shortly after this, Rudd was replaced by Sajid Javid who commissioned solicitor and an inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams as an Independent Adviser on 21 June 2018 to perform an independent review of the events leading up to the Windrush scandal. In the review, Williams gives 30 recommendations to the Home Office based on her findings which she says can be distilled into three elements:
“The Home Office must acknowledge the wrong which has been done; it must open itself up to greater external scrutiny; and it must change its culture to recognise that migration and wider Home Office policy is about people and, whatever its objective, should be rooted in humanity. I encourage the Home Secretary and the Home Office to implement my recommendations in full.”
“The Home Office must acknowledge the wrong which has been done; it must open itself up to greater external scrutiny; and it must change its culture to recognise that migration and wider Home Office policy is about people and, whatever its objective, should be rooted in humanity. I encourage the Home Secretary and the Home Office to implement my recommendations in full.”
In an interview with the BBC in June 2020, Williams said:
"The Home Office has a very stark choice. It can decide not to implement my recommendations and, if that happens, then I think there is a very grave risk of something similar happening again."
The Windrush Compensation scheme has also come under great scrutiny due to the slow pace of claims being processed as about 400 out of around 2,000 have been since the scheme launched in 2019 with the average claim taking 14 months to process (ref). With more and more stories of people who are living through this process surface, the stark realities of how the mishandling of immigration control can greatly affect the wellbeing and livelihoods of people are hard to ignore. But this is not the first time the UK has enforced hostile immigration controls that have uprooted the lives of people who came to Britain to assist in rebuilding it after a war.
Just three years prior to the Empire Windrush docking in Tilbury, the UK government embarked on a deportation programme that involved forcibly sending large groups of Chinese migrants back to China after they had also helped Britain recover from World War II. We will be taking a closer look at this experience in the next part of this article.
credits
words - mo ray
research - karina so., mo ray
