When Dark-Skinned Citizens Lose Their Citizenship

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/opinion/britain-caribbean-colonies-citizenship.html

When Dark-Skinned Citizens Lose Their Citizenship
By The Editorial Board
April 27, 2018

The Windrush scandal in Britain is, on one level, uniquely British. It’s about people who were brought from Britain’s Caribbean colonies after World War II to help rebuild England and then, decades later, discarded. But it is also a bitter parable of how governments in prosperous Western societies — the United States very much among them — have turned on dark-skinned migrants as alien interlopers.

These immigrants are known as the “Windrush generation” after the ship that brought the first large group of West Indians to London in June 1948, at the invitation of the British government, to fill a postwar labor shortage. More arrived over the next quarter-century, many with children.

Born in British colonies, they held British citizenship under laws in force at the time and rightly presumed that they were fully entitled to live and work in Britain. Immigration laws were tightened after 1962, eventually putting an end to large-scale migration from the Commonwealth.

The current problems for the Windrush-era migrants began in 2012 when the government, with Theresa May as home secretary, cracked down on illegal immigrants, making it necessary for them to document their right to government benefits, including health services. Many people born in Caribbean countries arrived as children on their parents’ passports and had never applied for their own travel or immigration documents; many others took their status for granted.

The Home Office did not keep records that would have confirmed their status, and a Home Office whistle-blower revealed that thousands of landing cards from the 1950s and ’60s, which would have confirmed the migrants’ arrival dates, had been destroyed during a move. As The Guardian chronicled in a series of articles, the callousness of the bureaucracy led many to be threatened with deportation, denied health services, fired or left homeless.

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