Shadows Before the Storm: Caribbean Britons Begin Losing Their Rights

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2018 | Period covered: July–December 2017

Key Developments at a Glance

• Guardian investigations expose Caribbean-born Britons wrongly treated as undocumented migrants.
• Albert Thompson, a Jamaican-born man, denied NHS cancer treatment despite decades in Britain.
• Hostile environment’s right-to-rent and right-to-work checks ensnaring Commonwealth citizens.
• Home Office insists cases are isolated; community groups say the problem is systemic and growing.
• Amber Rudd as Home Secretary defends immigration enforcement, dismisses calls for policy review.
• Jamaica’s High Commission in London receives growing number of distress calls from affected residents.

Something is going wrong in Britain, and the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora community knows it. Over the second half of 2017, a pattern has been emerging — quietly, without the fanfare of a political crisis, but with a gathering dread for those who lived through the postwar migration from the Caribbean to Britain, or who are the children and grandchildren of that generation. Long-settled Commonwealth citizens — people who arrived in the United Kingdom as British subjects before 1973, who have worked, paid taxes, raised families, and built communities here for decades — are finding themselves suddenly categorised as immigration offenders. And the machinery of the hostile environment, introduced under Theresa May’s Home Office and extended in the 2014 Immigration Act, is closing around them.

The Guardian’s Investigations: A Crisis Begins to Surface

The most significant development of this period has been the publication in the Guardian of a series of investigative reports, primarily by journalist Amelia Gentleman, documenting the experiences of Caribbean-born residents in the United Kingdom who have been wrongly identified as illegal immigrants. The reports, which began appearing in November 2017, describe in harrowing detail the real-world consequences of hostile environment enforcement on people who entered the UK legally as children or young adults and have lived here, in many cases, for more than half a century.

Among the cases most powerfully documented is that of Albert Thompson, a Jamaican-born man who came to the United Kingdom in 1973 and has lived here for over four decades. Thompson was denied cancer treatment by the NHS — specifically radiotherapy for prostate cancer — after he was unable to provide the documentation the hospital required to establish his entitlement to NHS care. Thompson has no passport and no formal immigration documents, because as a Commonwealth citizen who arrived before the 1971 Immigration Act came into full force, he was never required to have them. His right to be in the United Kingdom is settled in law. His cancer, untreated, is not waiting for the paperwork to catch up.

Thompson’s case has horrified campaigners and caused outrage in the Caribbean community. Médecins du Monde, the international humanitarian organisation, became involved in advocating for his treatment. MPs raised his case in the House of Commons. The Home Office, when pressed, has offered assurances but no rapid resolution. Thompson’s situation encapsulates with brutal clarity what the hostile environment means in practice for people whose right to be in Britain was never in doubt.

The Hostile Environment’s Human Toll

The hostile environment, as a policy framework, works by enlisting landlords, employers, banks, and public services as enforcers of immigration law. Under the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016, it is a criminal offence to rent accommodation or employ someone who cannot prove their right to be in the UK. Banks are required to check customers’ immigration status. NHS trusts are required to verify entitlement to free treatment. Driving licences can be denied on immigration grounds.

For the generation that arrived in Britain from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s as British subjects, and who in many cases have no documentation beyond perhaps a school report or a National Insurance number, these requirements create an insurmountable problem. They cannot prove what is legally true: that they have the right to be here. As a result, they are losing jobs, being denied NHS care, having their driving licences revoked, and being turned away by landlords — rendered homeless and destitute by a policy machinery that does not distinguish between those who genuinely have no right to remain and those, like the Windrush generation, whose right is beyond question.

Community organisations working with this generation — among them the Notting Hill Carnival Association, the Hackney Migrant Centre, and several Caribbean-heritage churches in south London — have been dealing with an increasing volume of distress cases through the latter half of 2017. Legal aid charities report that the combination of public funding cuts and the complexity of immigration law has left many of the most vulnerable individuals unable to access the legal help they need to challenge decisions or obtain documentation.

Parliament Stirs: Early Warning Signs Ignored

There have been voices in parliament raising concerns about the impact of hostile environment policies on long-settled Commonwealth citizens for some years. The issue has been raised in the context of the Immigration Acts as they progressed through parliament, and individual constituency MPs have brought specific cases to the attention of Home Office ministers. But the political will to examine the issue systematically has been absent. The government’s position, maintained by Home Secretary Amber Rudd through the second half of 2017, is that the hostile environment targets only those with no right to remain in the United Kingdom, and that anyone who can demonstrate lawful residence has nothing to fear.

That position is demonstrably inadequate to address the reality being documented by the Guardian and described by community groups. The problem is not merely one of individuals who fall through administrative cracks; it is structural. A generation arrived in Britain without the documentation that subsequent immigration law demanded, and no mechanism was put in place to ensure that their status was proactively confirmed before hostile environment enforcement began to affect them. The destruction of landing cards held by the Home Office — records that would in many cases have confirmed lawful entry — has compounded the difficulty.

MPs including David Lammy, Diane Abbott, and Paulette Hamilton have raised individual constituency cases with the Home Office. Caribbean High Commissioners in London have begun seeking meetings with Home Office officials. The signs, for those who choose to read them, are clear. But as 2017 ends, the scale of the crisis and the political response it demands have not yet been fully grasped at the highest levels of government.

Deportation Flights: A Continuing Source of Tension

Alongside the emerging documentation crisis, the continuation of deportation charter flights from the United Kingdom to Jamaica remains a source of profound tension between the two governments and within the diaspora community. Campaign groups including Detention Action and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants have mounted legal challenges and public campaigns against individual deportation flights, focusing in particular on cases where individuals subject to removal orders were brought to the UK as children and have spent their entire adult lives here.

The legal framework under which these deportations proceed — principally the UK Borders Act 2007, which mandates deportation of foreign nationals sentenced to twelve months or more in prison — is not new. But its application to individuals who are, in every meaningful sense, British — who arrived as infants, attended British schools, whose family and community ties are entirely in the United Kingdom — raises profound questions about proportionality and justice. These are questions that the Jamaican government, through diplomatic channels, has been pressing. And these are questions that the hostile environment crisis, now beginning to surface publicly, may soon force into a much sharper public light.

Jamaica: Concern Deepens, Advocacy Intensifies

In Kingston, Prime Minister Andrew Holness and the Jamaica Labour Party government are watching developments in the United Kingdom with growing concern. The treatment of Jamaican nationals and Jamaican-heritage British residents by hostile environment enforcement has been the subject of repeated representations to UK counterparts. The Jamaica High Commission in London — the frontline of the Jamaican state’s response to the crisis affecting its diaspora — is processing an increasing number of cases, offering what consular assistance it can, and pressing Home Office officials for systematic review of the way hostile environment policies are being applied to Commonwealth citizens of longstanding residence.

Jamaica’s diaspora in the United Kingdom remains among the largest and most significant of any Caribbean nation. Remittances from Britain are an important component of Jamaica’s economic picture. The cultural, family and social ties between Jamaica and the UK are deep and reciprocal. The Holness government is acutely aware that the mistreatment of the Jamaican community in Britain is not merely a humanitarian concern but a diplomatic one with real bilateral weight.

As 2018 begins, few could predict quite how dramatically and swiftly the quiet crisis documented in these pages will become a national emergency. The ingredients are all present: a growing body of documented cases, a community in distress, an investigative press alert to the story, and a political class beginning to feel the first pressure of accountability. What comes next will determine not only the fate of thousands of individual Caribbean Britons but the character of the United Kingdom itself.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; The Guardian (Amelia Gentleman); BBC News; Reuters; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Detention Action; Hackney Migrant Centre; Médecins du Monde; UK Parliament Hansard; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK).

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