Indians are among those caught up in the Windrush controversy rocking the British government, Dianne Abbott, the Labour Party’s spokesperson on Home Affairs, said during a debate in Parliament, as the scandal over the impact of Britain’s ‘hostile immigration’ regime on Britons of Commonwealth origin refuses to die down.
Those from India, Pakistan, West Africa and other parts of the Commonwealth are also facing the same plight as many from the Caribbean, she said during a debate called by the Labour party. “This is an issue that has resonated across the Commonwealth…There is a whole series of Commonwealth migrants who unless the Home Secretary does what it takes will suffer the same humiliation that the Windrush generation did.”
HMT Empire Windrush was a passenger liner that brought hundreds of passengers largely from the Caribbean to Britain in 1948, as Britain sought labour from its (then) current and former colonies to fill acute labour shortages. The liner has given its name to the whole generation of Caribbean citizens who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971, encouraged by this policy drive.
Under a toughening immigration regime, and bureaucratic mess-ups that resulted in documentation being lost, many of these men and women have begun to be penalised for failing to have the right documentation and are being treated as illegal immigrants. Some have been unable to work, others have been denied health care, while still others have been unable to return to Britain following trips overseas. While most of the cases that have come to light apply to Caribbean citizens, there have been warnings that citizens from across the Commonwealth were likely to be impacted.
According to the Oxford Migration Observatory, an estimated 57,000 non-U.K. nationals arrived in Britain before 1971, including 13,000 from India. Many may have had documentation to demonstrate their status and therefore not face the difficulties of the Windrush generation.
While the Conservative government has sought to treat the crisis as an isolated issue at the Home Office, with new South Asian-origin Home Minister Sajid Javid pledging a raft of measures to inject transparency into a review process into how the crisis came about, Opposition parties have pinned the blame on the wider immigration policy environment in the U.K.
“The problem with the hostile environment they set up is that it has swept up perfectly legally British citizens up with it,” said Ms. Abbott during the debate. “Its treatment of the Windrush generation was not an aberration not a hiccup the predicted consequence of a policy they intend to continue with.”
The debate comes amid more and more revelations about the impact of Britain’s tough immigration regime. Earlier this week, The Evening Standard newspaper, edited by former Chancellor George Osborne, alleged that Prime Minister Theresa May, formerly Home Secretary, had personally vetoed calls for visa rules to be relaxed in order to let in doctors needed by the NHS.
Last week, it emerged that hundreds of non-EU doctors, including from India, had been denied visas even after being recruited by NHS trusts, in efforts to fill acute skill shortages. A separate scandal is brewing over the treatment of foreign students. The Financial Times estimated that up to 7,000 foreign students may have been deported from the U.K. after being wrongly accused of faking English-language tests. Both instances were brought up by Ms. Abbott, and other MPs during the debate.
“The government was warned that the negative outcomes for Commonwealth citizens would be a consequence of the hostile environment policy,” concluded Ms. Abbott. “At a time we are trying to build our relationship with the Commonwealth post Brexit, for trade and other reasons, it is extremely damaging what has been revealed about the way the Windrush generation have been treated.”
