The Hostile Environment Enshrined: Immigration Act 2014 and the Caribbean Cost

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2015 | Period covered: July–December 2014

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Immigration Act 2014 enters into force — right-to-rent checks piloted in West Midlands from December 2014.
• “Deport first, appeal later” provisions enacted; legal aid for immigration cases severely curtailed.
• CARICOM Reparations Commission ten-point programme, adopted March 2014, in active development.
• Caribbean community organisations report rising cases of long-settled residents denied services.
• Portia Simpson Miller government presses UK on reparations and deportation policy through CARICOM.
• Deportation charter flights to Jamaica continue; Detention Action and campaign groups challenge individual cases.

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The second half of 2014 has been defined, for the Jamaican and wider Caribbean community in the United Kingdom, by the entry into force of the Immigration Act 2014 — a piece of legislation whose ambition, as explicitly stated by Home Secretary Theresa May, is to make life in Britain so difficult for people without leave to remain that they will choose to leave voluntarily. The Act, which received Royal Assent in May 2014 and whose key provisions have been coming into force through the second half of the year, represents the most significant extension of the hostile environment policy since its introduction and marks a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and those whose immigration status is uncertain — or who cannot prove that it is not.

The Immigration Act 2014: What It Means in Practice

The Immigration Act 2014 contains a range of provisions, but for the Jamaican and Caribbean community three are particularly consequential. The first is the right-to-rent scheme, under which landlords in the private rented sector are required to check the immigration status of all prospective tenants before entering into a tenancy. The scheme is being piloted in the West Midlands from December 2014, with national rollout anticipated. Landlords who let to a person without the right to remain in the UK face civil penalties of up to £3,000 per occupant.

The second is the “deport first, appeal later” provision, which removes the right of certain categories of foreign nationals facing deportation to appeal their removal while remaining in the United Kingdom. Under the new provision, those subject to deportation orders must leave and appeal from outside the UK in most cases. For individuals with deep roots in Britain — families, jobs, homes — the prospect of being removed and fighting an appeal from the Caribbean is practically and emotionally devastating. Campaign groups argue that it makes meaningful challenge to deportation decisions effectively impossible for many people.

The third is the requirement on NHS England and NHS trusts to implement overseas charging for patients who cannot demonstrate their entitlement to free treatment. While the practical implementation is complex and uneven, the principle that immigration status must be verified before NHS care is provided has begun to create barriers for patients who cannot readily produce documentation. For elderly Caribbean-born residents who came to Britain as Commonwealth citizens before formal immigration documentation was routinely required, the implications are deeply troubling.

The Caribbean Community: Documentation and Dread

Community organisations working with the Windrush generation — Caribbean-born residents who arrived in Britain as British subjects before 1973 — are already seeing the consequences of the Act’s provisions begin to bite. Legal aid charities report that individuals who have lived and worked in Britain for fifty years are being asked by landlords and employers to produce documentation that was never issued to them and which the Home Office no longer holds in any retrievable form. When the Home Office destroyed the landing card records of Caribbean arrivals in 2010 — a decision that has never been adequately accounted for publicly — it removed one of the few sources of administrative evidence that might have helped this generation prove their arrival date and therefore their status.

The right-to-rent pilot in the West Midlands — a region with a substantial Caribbean heritage population in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry — is already generating cases of individuals being turned down by landlords who are uncertain about their status and unwilling to risk a civil penalty. The effect is discriminatory in practice: landlords, facing an incentive to take the path of least risk, are increasingly likely to rent to those who can produce a passport or biometric residence permit and to turn away those who cannot, regardless of their actual right to remain in the UK. Community groups have raised this concern directly with the Home Office; the response has been, thus far, that implementation is being monitored and adjustments will be made if problems emerge.

CARICOM’s Ten-Point Programme: Building the Framework

Alongside these developments in the United Kingdom, the second half of 2014 has seen the CARICOM Reparations Commission continue to develop and operationalise the ten-point reparatory justice programme adopted unanimously by CARICOM heads of government at their thirty-fifth summit in Antigua and Barbuda in March 2014. The commission, chaired by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, has been working with individual member state governments to develop their specific national reparations claims and to build the regional architecture needed to pursue those claims collectively and with legal force.

The ten-point programme positions reparatory justice not as a single demand for a cash payment but as a comprehensive framework of actions — apology, repatriation, indigenous people’s development, cultural institutions, public health programmes, illiteracy eradication, debt cancellation, psychological rehabilitation, and science and technology development — that together address the structural consequences of slavery and colonialism for Caribbean societies. The commission has been at pains to stress that this is a developmental agenda, not a backward-looking one, and that its fulfilment would produce tangible benefits for the Caribbean’s future rather than simply compensating for its past.

Jamaica’s role in the commission, under the leadership of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, has been particularly active. Jamaica has historically been one of the most intensively exploited plantation economies in the Atlantic world, and its contemporary social and economic challenges — high inequality, high debt, high crime, weak institutional capacity in some areas — can be traced directly to the structure of the plantation economy and its aftermath. For Jamaica, reparatory justice is not an abstraction; it is a precondition for the sustainable development that the country’s people deserve and that the legacy of exploitation has denied.

Deportations and the Jamaican Government’s Response

Deportation charter flights from the United Kingdom to Jamaica continue to be a regular and painful feature of the bilateral relationship. The “deport first, appeal later” provisions of the 2014 Act, now entering into force, have heightened concern that individuals facing deportation will have less practical ability to challenge their removal before they are put on a plane. Campaign groups including Detention Action and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants have renewed their calls for the provision to be repealed, or at minimum for explicit exemptions to be created for individuals who came to the UK as children and have spent their entire adult lives here.

Jamaica’s government has pressed the UK through diplomatic channels on the deportation issue, and the Jamaican High Commission in London has been active in providing consular assistance to Jamaican nationals facing deportation proceedings. But the policy framework remains unchanged, and the Jamaican government’s leverage is limited in the face of a British government that regards deportation as a non-negotiable element of immigration enforcement and has enshrined it more firmly in statute.

Looking Ahead: 2015 and the General Election

As 2015 begins, the British general election due by May has begun to shape the political landscape. The Conservative Party under David Cameron is running on a platform that includes a pledge to reduce net immigration to below 100,000 — a target that has been missed in every year it has been set and that is driving increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement to demonstrate political commitment. The Labour Party, seeking to reclaim credibility on immigration after years of attack for its open-door policies as a governing party, has been reluctant to make the case for reform of hostile environment policies in clear terms. The Liberal Democrats, whose presence in the coalition has provided some restraint on the most extreme elements of immigration enforcement, face potential electoral wipeout.

For the Caribbean community, the election offers few obvious political allies. But the reparations argument, the anti-deportation campaign, and the documentation crisis facing the Windrush generation are building a body of evidence and advocacy that will eventually demand a political response. The question is how long that will take — and how many people will be harmed before it does.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; Home Office (UK); UK Parliament Hansard; CARICOM Reparations Commission; Detention Action; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Runnymede Trust; Jamaica High Commission London; NHS England.

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