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Author Topic: When Dark-Skinned Citizens Lose Their Citizenship  (Read 1130 times)

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When Dark-Skinned Citizens Lose Their Citizenship
« on: April 28, 2018, 08:21:29 AM »
When Dark-Skinned Citizens Lose Their Citizenship
By The Editorial Board, The New York Times


The Windrush scandal in Britain is, on one level, uniquely British. It’s about people who were brought from Britain’s Caribbean colonies after World War II to help rebuild England and then, decades later, discarded. But it is also a bitter parable of how governments in prosperous Western societies — the United States very much among them — have turned on dark-skinned migrants as alien interlopers.

These immigrants are known as the “Windrush generation” after the ship that brought the first large group of West Indians to London in June 1948, at the invitation of the British government, to fill a postwar labor shortage. More arrived over the next quarter-century, many with children.

Born in British colonies, they held British citizenship under laws in force at the time and rightly presumed that they were fully entitled to live and work in Britain. Immigration laws were tightened after 1962, eventually putting an end to large-scale migration from the Commonwealth.

The current problems for the Windrush-era migrants began in 2012 when the government, with Theresa May as home secretary, cracked down on illegal immigrants, making it necessary for them to document their right to government benefits, including health services. Many people born in Caribbean countries arrived as children on their parents’ passports and had never applied for their own travel or immigration documents; many others took their status for granted.

The Home Office did not keep records that would have confirmed their status, and a Home Office whistle-blower revealed that thousands of landing cards from the 1950s and ’60s, which would have confirmed the migrants’ arrival dates, had been destroyed during a move. As The Guardian chronicled in a series of articles, the callousness of the bureaucracy led many to be threatened with deportation, denied health services, fired or left homeless.

Mrs. May, now Britain’s prime minister, recently apologized to the many thousands of people affected, but she deserves little credit. As home secretary she set the stage for the scandal by pledging to create a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, and it was only when public outrage soared, and leaders of former British colonies had gathered in London for a Commonwealth meeting, that she said, “We are genuinely sorry.”

The British government has now set up a special team to urgently affirm the legal rights of these migrants and reimburse them for their losses. That is the least it should do.

Nothing can really compensate them for the hell many went through. Nor do the apology or belated fixes change the fact that this was due to the government’s hostility to immigrants, and especially immigrants of color. The same official hostility can be found in many parts of Europe toward Middle Eastern refugees and in the Trump administration’s policy toward immigrants from Central America.

When Mrs. May speaks of creating a hostile environment for immigrants; or Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, says that with mass immigration “our worst nightmares can come true”; or President Trump describes immigrants as criminals, they feed a hostility that spreads through bureaucracy, law enforcement and the public. And they inflict suffering even on those like the Windrush generation, people who have lived and worked for 50 years in a country they believe to be their own.

 

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