Brexit Britain and the Diaspora’s Uncertain Future

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2017 | Period covered: July–December 2016

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Key Developments at a Glance

• Theresa May becomes Prime Minister on 13 July 2016 — hostile environment’s architect enters Downing Street.
• Amber Rudd appointed Home Secretary; Caribbean community watches the new team with anxiety.
• Brexit’s Leave vote triggers surge in racially motivated incidents across England and Wales.
• Government signals intent to trigger Article 50 by end of March 2017; diaspora concerns deepen.
• Caribbean-heritage British nationals unsure whether new immigration system will affect their rights.
• Jamaica presses UK at Commonwealth level on diaspora welfare, deportations and rights protection.

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The Brexit vote of 23 June 2016 continues to cast its long shadow over the second half of the year, reshaping British politics in ways that will take years to work through and whose consequences for the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora are not yet fully knowable. What is already clear, six months on from the vote, is that the political context in which Caribbean communities in Britain live their lives has been altered, that the temperature around immigration has risen, and that the woman who enters Downing Street in July as Prime Minister carries with her a record on immigration policy that the diaspora community has profound reasons to watch with care.

Theresa May: From Home Office to Number 10

Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister on 13 July 2016 — following David Cameron’s resignation the morning after the Brexit result and the implosion of the Conservative leadership contest — is an event of singular significance for the Caribbean community. May served as Home Secretary from May 2010 to July 2016 — the longest continuous tenure in that office in the modern era. During that period, she oversaw the introduction of what she explicitly described as a “hostile environment” for people in the United Kingdom without leave to remain. The policies she introduced — right-to-rent checks, right-to-work checks, bank account restrictions, NHS charging, and the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts that codified and extended those measures — constitute the architecture within which Caribbean-born British residents are now increasingly finding their rights contested.

For community organisations that have spent years pressing the Home Office to reconsider the hostile environment’s impact on long-settled Commonwealth citizens, the elevation of its architect to the highest office in the land is a dispiriting development. Amber Rudd, appointed in May’s place as Home Secretary, has indicated that she will maintain the direction of immigration policy set by her predecessor. The continuity of personnel and policy means that the pressure on Caribbean-born residents without formal documentation is unlikely to ease.

The Brexit Effect: A More Hostile Climate

The period since the June referendum has seen a documented increase in hate crimes across England and Wales. Reports of racially aggravated harassment and assault rose significantly in the weeks following the vote. Community organisations and race equality bodies including the Runnymede Trust and Operation Black Vote have documented a climate in which people of colour, regardless of their nationality, citizenship or length of residence in the United Kingdom, have faced an increase in overt hostility. The Leave campaign’s focus on immigration and the slogan of “Taking Back Control” of Britain’s borders has, in the view of many community leaders, given licence to those who equate tighter immigration control with the removal or marginalisation of visible minorities more broadly.

For the Caribbean diaspora, whose members in the overwhelming majority are British citizens or settled residents with rights that predate the European Union, the experience of being caught up in this climate of hostility is particularly bitter. A Jamaican-born Briton who arrived in 1962 and spent fifty-four years building a life here is not an EU free-movement migrant; has nothing to do with the concerns that animated the Leave vote; and yet finds that the post-referendum atmosphere does not readily distinguish between categories of foreignness. In several Caribbean-heritage communities, incidents of verbal abuse directed at Black British residents in the period following the referendum have been reported to community organisations, with participants evidently believing that the vote result means that Black Britons should also “go home.”

The New Immigration Architecture: Caribbean Concerns

The government has confirmed that it intends to trigger Article 50 — the formal process of leaving the European Union — before the end of March 2017. The post-Brexit immigration system is under design, with the government committed in principle to a points-based system that ends the free movement of EU nationals and applies consistent criteria to all migrants regardless of origin. In principle, this might suggest a levelling of the playing field between EU nationals and Commonwealth nationals. In practice, community groups are concerned that a points-based system calibrated to the skills and income levels of economic migrants will bear little relation to the reality of the Caribbean-born British community, many of whose members are elderly, retired, or in low-income employment.

The question of settled status for long-term residents is particularly acute. EU nationals resident in the UK are deeply anxious about their post-Brexit status, and the government has made various assurances about their protection — though the details of those assurances are still being worked out. For Caribbean-born British residents whose settled status should, in law, be unquestioned, there is a concern that the rush to create new immigration systems may create new points of administrative vulnerability for people who have always relied on the informality of their settled status rather than formal documentation.

The 2014 Immigration Act’s hostile environment provisions — which require employers, landlords, banks and public services to check immigration status — are already demonstrating the danger of documentation-dependent systems for people whose lawful residence has never needed to be formally documented. As the Brexit-era immigration architecture is constructed, Caribbean community organisations are pressing for explicit protections to be built in for the generation that arrived in Britain before 1973.

Deportations and Diplomatic Tensions

Deportation charter flights to Jamaica continue to be a source of sustained tension in the UK-Jamaica relationship. Campaign organisations have challenged specific flights in court with mixed success. The legal framework remains broadly intact, with the mandatory deportation provisions of the UK Borders Act 2007 continuing to apply to foreign nationals — including those brought to the UK as young children — who receive prison sentences of twelve months or more.

Jamaica’s government, under Andrew Holness, has consistently pressed the UK through diplomatic channels to apply greater discretion in deportation cases involving individuals with long-term UK residence and minimal ties to Jamaica. The High Commission in London has been involved in individual cases and in broader diplomatic exchanges. Jamaica has also raised the issue at Commonwealth forums, where Caribbean solidarity provides a collective voice that individual governments cannot achieve alone. Progress has been slow but the Holness administration has made clear that deportation policy is a red line in bilateral relations that cannot simply be brushed aside.

Reparations: A Slow Burn

The reparations agenda, advanced so powerfully by CARICOM in 2013 and 2014 and given its most painful illustration by David Cameron’s visit to Jamaica in 2015 — when he offered money for a prison and told Jamaica to “move on” from slavery — continues to develop, though progress in engaging the UK government has been minimal. CARICOM’s Reparations Commission, under the chairmanship of Professor Sir Hilary Beckles of the University of the West Indies, maintains the ten-point reparatory justice programme as the framework for Caribbean demands. The commission continues to build the academic and legal case for reparations, engaging with international law scholars, historians, and economists to construct arguments that go beyond moral claims to legal and economic ones.

Britain’s new government under May has shown no more inclination than its predecessor to engage with reparations. The Brexit crisis has consumed all available political bandwidth. But the issue has not gone away, and within Caribbean communities — both in the region and in the diaspora — the combination of the Brexit atmosphere and the hostile environment has renewed the energy behind the reparations argument. The connection between the wealth that built Britain, the labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and the treatment of the Windrush generation is one that community leaders and academics are drawing with increasing force. It will not be resolved in this political moment. But neither will it be silenced.

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

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