Lewisham to Kingston

The Immigration Act 2014 passed with modest parliamentary attention. The harm it would do to settled Caribbean communities would take years to become visible. By then, it would be very hard to undo

Briefing

• Immigration Act 2014 receives Royal Assent in May; hostile environment extended.
• Private landlords, banks and the NHS required to check immigration status.
• CARICOM reparations commission builds legal case; diaspora advocates amplify demands.
• Jamaica-IMF programme continues; remittances remain critical to island economy.
• Lewisham Caribbean community marks 50 years of Caribbean community life in the borough.

The Immigration Act 2014 received Royal Assent on 14 May 2014. It was, in the language of immigration law, a significant piece of legislation: it extended the obligations on landlords to check the immigration status of tenants before renting to them, on banks to check the status of account holders, and on a range of public services to verify the entitlement of those seeking to use them. Home Secretary Theresa May described the measure as part of a programme to make Britain a hostile environment for those with no right to be here. The phrase — hostile environment — was not new; it had been used by May in an interview in 2012 and had informed policy development since. But the 2014 Act embedded the hostile environment’s requirements into primary legislation, making them enforceable and extending them to a new range of private and public actors.

The Act passed with relatively little public controversy. Its provisions were debated in Parliament, and civil liberties organisations and immigration charities raised concerns about its implications. The specific risk to long-settled Caribbean-born British residents — whose documentation was often incomplete, whose landlords would now be legally required to check their status, whose banks would now be entitled to close accounts if status could not be confirmed — was identified by some advocates but did not become a subject of national public concern. The harm that would flow from the 2014 Act, to people who had been in Britain for decades and who were unambiguously British in every meaningful sense, was still being accumulated, case by case, in the files of community legal clinics and advice centres that would carry the evidence into the 2018 scandal.

Landlords and the Right to Rent

The right to rent provisions of the Immigration Act 2014, which required landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants before agreeing a tenancy, were immediately controversial in the housing sector and in civil society. Landlords — most of whom had no experience of immigration law — were now required to make determinations that immigration lawyers sometimes found complex, with civil penalties for getting it wrong. The predictable consequence, documented in subsequent research, was that landlords became more likely to rent to people who looked and sounded unambiguously British, and less likely to rent to those whose status they were uncertain about. The mechanism for discriminating on grounds of race was being embedded in the housing market under the guise of immigration control.

Community organisations in Lewisham, Hackney, Handsworth and across the areas of settled Caribbean community life in Britain noted the right to rent provisions with concern. The housing market was already challenging for Caribbean-heritage tenants, who faced documented discrimination from private landlords independent of any immigration requirement. The 2014 Act added a legal mechanism to a market in which informal discrimination was already widespread. The combination would, in subsequent years, compound the difficulties of Caribbean-born British residents whose documentation was incomplete or who had difficulty proving their right to be in Britain through the Home Office’s administrative processes.

Reparations: The Legal Case Builds

While the Immigration Act was building the legal architecture of the hostile environment, the CARICOM Reparations Commission was building a legal case of a different kind. The commission, working through its network of national reparations committees and its academic partners at the University of the West Indies, had commissioned legal opinions, historical documentation and economic analysis in support of the reparations claim. By the first half of 2014, the commission was engaging with international law scholars and with civil society organisations across the globe, building the evidentiary foundation for what it intended to present as a formal legal claim against the former colonial powers.

The diaspora’s role was active and multifaceted. Community organisations in Lewisham and across south London hosted public meetings. Caribbean-heritage academics at British universities contributed research. Diaspora advocacy organisations in New York, Toronto and Amsterdam coordinated international solidarity campaigns. The reparations argument was not new — it had been made in various forms since the abolition of slavery — but the CARICOM framework gave it a new precision and a new institutional backing that demanded engagement rather than dismissal from the governments being addressed.

Jamaica: Economy, Diaspora and Endurance

Jamaica was in the second year of a demanding programme of economic adjustment under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund. The programme was producing results in terms of debt reduction and fiscal stability, but it was doing so through a compression of public spending that was visible in reduced services, delayed infrastructure maintenance and ongoing pressure on the public sector workers who delivered them. Remittances from the diaspora — estimated at more than two billion US dollars annually — were a critical buffer, providing household income to families whose access to public services and formal employment was constrained by the adjustment programme.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Lewisham and across the world, the economic situation in Jamaica was a constant background presence: something to be monitored, something to be supported through remittances and investment, something that shaped the conversations at family gatherings and on community radio programmes about whether Jamaica was moving forward or standing still. The answer, in the first half of 2014, was nuanced: some things were improving, by some measures, and others were not. The UK-Jamaica bilateral relationship continued, as it always had, on multiple levels simultaneously — political and diplomatic, economic and cultural, personal and familial — woven together in ways that no single story could capture and that no government policy, however well or badly designed, could entirely contain.