Immigration Policy
For generations, migration has been part of the Jamaican economic story. Britain, the United States and Canada offered education, employment,…
When Boris Johnson entered Downing Street in July 2019 with a promise to deliver Brexit by any means, the Caribbean community in Britain faced a simple and frightening question: what would leaving the European Union mean for people whose right to be here had already proved more fragile than anyone had admitted?
In April 2019, the Windrush Compensation Scheme finally opened. In May, Theresa May — the Home Secretary who had created the hostile environment that produced the Windrush scandal — resigned as Prime Minister. Neither event delivered the closure the Caribbean community sought, but together they marked a turning point.
Six months after the Windrush scandal broke, the Caribbean community in Britain was monitoring a government that had promised much and delivered little. The Windrush Lessons Learned Review was underway. Sajid Javid was at the Home Office. And the Carnival, after a break for rain, had returned to Notting Hill.
In April 2018, the Windrush scandal became impossible to ignore. Caribbean leaders confronted Theresa May at a Commonwealth summit in London. Amber Rudd resigned as Home Secretary. And Britain was forced to reckon, publicly and painfully, with what it had done to the generation that had answered its call.
Hurricane Irma struck the Eastern Caribbean in September 2017 with a ferocity that exposed both the climate vulnerability of small island states and the inadequacy of the British government’s response to its overseas territories. For the diaspora in Handsworth and across Britain, fundraising began before the storm had passed.
Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Jamaica in April 2015. He landed at Norman Manley International Airport, met Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, spoke about diaspora connections, and left. Jamaica decriminalised cannabis the same month. In May, Britain re-elected a Conservative government.
When Portia Simpson Miller was sworn in as Jamaica’s Prime Minister on 30 March 2006, the reaction in the diaspora went deeper than the ordinary satisfaction of a political milestone. For the Jamaican community in Reading, as across Britain, her arrival at the head of government was received as something that had been earned through a long history of Caribbean women’s leadership — in politics, in churches, in community organisations — that had rarely been formally recognised at this scale.