Invisible and Wronged: The Hostile Environment Closes In

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

Key Developments at a Glance

• Article 50 triggered 29 March 2017 — Brexit becomes legally irreversible, diaspora fears deepen.
• Caribbean community organisations report rising cases of Commonwealth citizens denied work and housing.
• Hostile environment right-to-rent checks extended and enforced more aggressively across England.
• General election called by Theresa May for 8 June 2017; Conservatives returned with reduced majority.
• Amber Rudd confirmed as Home Secretary under new Conservative government post-election.
• Jamaica’s Holness presses UK on deportation policy at Commonwealth bilateral meetings.

For the Jamaican and wider Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom, the first six months of 2017 have been defined above all by a single act of constitutional theatre and its consequences. When Theresa May’s government triggered Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union on 29 March 2017 — formally beginning the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union — it set in motion a process that will, in ways not yet fully visible, reshape the landscape of immigration, belonging, and rights for millions of people who call Britain home. For the Caribbean community, many of whose members arrived in the United Kingdom as British subjects and have never fully understood why their right to be here should be in question, the Brexit process has amplified anxieties that were already running high.

Article 50 and the Caribbean Diaspora’s Brexit Fears

The Caribbean diaspora’s concerns about Brexit are distinct from, though related to, those of EU nationals resident in the United Kingdom. EU nationals face the immediate and concrete question of their right to remain after Britain leaves the bloc. For Caribbean-heritage British residents — particularly those who are British citizens or who arrived before 1973 — the formal legal position is that Brexit does not affect their status. Their right to be in the United Kingdom derives from British nationality and Commonwealth immigration law, not from EU membership.

Yet within the community, the mood is not reassured. Brexit has been accompanied, in many communities across the country, by a perceptible hardening of attitudes towards immigration and immigrants generally. Hate crime statistics for the period following the June 2016 referendum show a significant rise in racially aggravated incidents. Community organisations in Brixton, Hackney, Handsworth and Moss Side report an increase in members describing experiences of hostility — in workplaces, in public spaces, in interactions with officialdom — that they attribute to the post-Brexit atmosphere. The distinction between a Caribbean-born British resident of fifty years’ standing and an economic migrant who arrived last year is not always legible to those who wish to make Britain’s borders feel more real.

There is also a deeper anxiety. The Brexit process is producing an extraordinary volume of new immigration legislation and policy, and the Caribbean community is watching carefully to ensure that the rights of Commonwealth citizens — which were in some respects constrained rather than protected by Britain’s entry into the European Community in 1973 — are not further eroded in the upheaval of departure. The government’s stated intention to introduce a points-based immigration system raises questions about how that system will treat Commonwealth nationals, and whether the historical preference that existed before 1971 will bear any weight in the new architecture.

The Hostile Environment: Tightening the Screw

Running alongside the Brexit drama, and largely beneath the radar of national political attention, the hostile environment policy framework continues to tighten its grip. The right-to-rent provisions of the 2014 Immigration Act, extended under the 2016 Immigration Act and actively enforced across England, require landlords to verify the immigration status of all prospective tenants before entering into a tenancy agreement. Landlords who fail to do so face civil penalties and, in cases of knowing non-compliance, criminal prosecution.

The practical effect for Caribbean-heritage residents who lack up-to-date travel documents — particularly those who arrived in Britain as children and who have no UK-issued identification reflecting their lawful status — has been to make the private rented sector effectively inaccessible. Landlords, unsure how to verify the status of someone who arrived in Britain before formal immigration records were routinely created, are opting for the path of least risk: renting to those whose documentation is unambiguous and turning away those whose right to be here is, in law, entirely clear but bureaucratically invisible.

In the employment sphere, a parallel process is underway. The 2014 Act introduced civil penalties of up to £20,000 per illegal worker for employers who fail to carry out right-to-work checks. Again, the victims are not those without any right to be in Britain; they are those whose right is genuine but undocumented. Community organisations are receiving cases of individuals who have worked for the same employer for fifteen, twenty, or thirty years and who are now being asked to produce documentation they do not possess and were never required to obtain. In some cases, employers are dismissing workers rather than navigating the uncertainty. These dismissals are unlawful in principle but practically very difficult to challenge without legal assistance that legal aid cuts have made increasingly difficult to obtain.

The General Election: A Change Without Change

Theresa May’s decision to call a snap general election for 8 June 2017 — breaking her promise not to do so — produced an unexpected result. The Conservative Party, which had entered the campaign with a polling lead of some twenty points, lost its overall majority and was forced into a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to remain in government. May’s weakened position has dominated political discussion since the election result, but the outcome has produced no immediate change in immigration policy direction.

Amber Rudd has been confirmed as Home Secretary in the new government. Her continuation in post means continuity of policy on the hostile environment and deportation flights. For the Caribbean community, which has been pressing for a reconsideration of policies that are causing demonstrable harm to long-settled residents, the election result offers no immediate relief. The Labour Party, which made gains in the election and has committed to reviewing hostile environment policies, is not in government. The policy machinery continues to turn.

Caribbean-heritage MPs, including Diane Abbott, David Lammy, and Helen Grant, returned to parliament and have continued to raise concerns about immigration enforcement, deportation flights, and the treatment of Commonwealth citizens in the House of Commons. Their voices carry more weight in a hung parliament, but the government’s working majority is dependent on a party with no natural sympathy for relaxation of immigration enforcement. The political arithmetic offers limited space for progress on the issues that matter most to the diaspora community.

Deportation Flights: The Campaign Continues

Campaign groups including Detention Action, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, and the Jamaican diaspora organisations have continued through the first half of 2017 to challenge individual deportation charter flights to Jamaica and to press for systemic change. Legal challenges have succeeded in some individual cases, with courts finding that the specific circumstances of individuals who came to the UK as young children and have no meaningful connection to Jamaica make deportation disproportionate under European human rights law.

But the broader policy framework remains in place. The Home Office continues to process deportations of foreign nationals with criminal convictions under the mandatory framework of the UK Borders Act 2007. The Jamaican community in Britain, and the Jamaican government in Kingston, continue to press for a more nuanced approach that takes full account of the personal circumstances of those being removed — their years of residence in the United Kingdom, their family ties, their absence of meaningful connection to Jamaica. Progress is slow and the political environment is not conducive to the compassionate case-by-case consideration that advocates are demanding.

Jamaica: Pressing On, Watching Carefully

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, in the second year of his administration following the JLP’s election victory in February 2016, continues to prioritise the relationship with the United Kingdom diaspora as a matter of strategic importance. The Jamaica diaspora in the UK contributes substantially to remittances, investment, and the broader Jamaica brand in one of the world’s most significant economies. The treatment of Jamaicans in the UK is therefore not merely a matter of human rights — though it is emphatically that — but a matter of bilateral relationship management.

Holness has raised diaspora issues at Commonwealth meetings and through bilateral diplomatic channels with the UK. Jamaica’s High Commission in London maintains active engagement with the communities it serves and with UK government officials. The broader questions of reparations — raised with such force by CARICOM in 2013 and 2014, and made viscerally relevant by David Cameron’s 2015 visit to Jamaica — remain on the agenda, though the Brexit crisis has consumed British political attention to a degree that leaves little space for sustained engagement on longer-term questions of historical justice. As this quarter ends, the community is watchful, resilient, and increasingly alert to the dangers of an environment that, too often, does not see or recognise them.

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

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