Conditional citizenship, the diaspora and a home that never was
By Melanie Sirinathsingh
April 23rd, 2018
Melanie is an independent scholar of race, space and public health
Summary
Over the last several years, Caribbean peoples living in the UK have been subject to increasing institutional exclusion as immigration legislation has begun to curtail basic civil rights and human dignity for the children of the first generation of Caribbean arrivals to the UK. This article offers that the cases publicised in the newspapers where people have been denied healthcare, housing and threatened with deportation must be understood in the context of conditionality within the original offer of citizenship on the basis of race and historical social hierarchy, which, once understood, can provide the opportunity to elaborate new conceptions of citizenship, nationhood and belonging that must contend with Britain’s colonial and neo-colonial relationship with the Caribbean and its peoples.
Last week, the Home Secretary of the UK Amber Rudd made an apology on behalf of her department for the recent treatment of the first children of the Caribbean diaspora in England (https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/16/theresa-may-caribbean-representatives-windrush-immigration ). Her own office had been overseeing the slow and steady theft of basic rights of Caribbean migrants who had arrived with their parents in the 50s and 60s, at that point officially British citizens by virtue of the then lauded benevolence of the British empire, however farcical, which offered nationality and therefore nominal equality of access to civil rights to all of the empire's colonised subjects who chose to live in England. In reality, these rights were tenuous, hanging squarely in the balance of racism, coloniality, and domestic intolerance. Citizenship never equated to humanity, because a true acknowledgment of the humanity of racialised and colonised peoples was simply not possible under empire. Recent events demonstrate the continued relevance of this statement.
Forced into what was called an unprecedented backdown by the UK's Guardian newspaper, Rudd said 'sorry'. What happens next is unclear, but given her department knowingly destroyed the landing cards of thousands of those children, the only surviving paperwork that can attest to their legitimate arrival in the U.K., just a few years ago, it seems unlikely the apology came with any genuine sincerity that was not propelled by public outcry and the unexpected attention afforded to the subject by one of the country's most widely read newspapers. Furthermore, Theresa May herself refused on first instance to meet representatives of the Caribbean nations when requested, not considering the matter of importance. Significantly, this same week the BBC chose to air the infamous so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, given by prominent conservative politician and imperial apologist Enoch Powell, in full on the radio to mark the 50th anniversary of the event. Powell had been health minister following several military escapades in the Middle East on behalf of the empire and is often erroneously dismissed as a racist outlier by contemporary commentators - by no means truly representative of racial attitudes of the majority of the public or of the government, despite evidence to the contrary provided by opinion polls of the time. In fact, Powell’s speech was largely dedicated to criticising the then Labour Government’s Race Relations Act which prohibited discrimination in areas such as housing, a fact less well known than the popularised facets of the speech that claimed the nation was being 'swamped' with migrants. Here, migration and race become both inextricably linked but largely misunderstood as one and the same phenomena, again by many contemporary liberal commentators. The BBC’s controversial decision belies the structural importance and cultural insistence of racial inequality in the country, as well as its relationship to both migration and conceptions of citizenship.
Let's not forget that within 15 years of the arrival of the Windrush with its 492 passengers from Jamaica, the British government had passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, followed soon after by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 which was soon superseded by another new Act, Immigration Act 1971. Each further curtailed the range of rights offered to peoples of territories colonised by the British. With the passing of each decade, it seems, the British government stealthily reneged on its own stated responsibilities and oft-gloated openness (which is repeatedly presented as a uniquely British value) towards those people from whom the wealth of the country has been extracted, both historically and contemporaneously via the utilisation of colonial labour to fill post-war shortages in the metropolis. As Bhambra (https://www.opendemocracy.net/gurminder-k-bhambra/brexit-commonwealth-and-exclusionary-citizenship) has put it, Britain turned citizens into migrants in a sudden moral panic that housing, education and healthcare couldn't stretch their services to the darker citizens of the empire. By the time the Immigration Act 2014 was passed, with its stated aim to create what May openly called a 'hostile environment' for migrants, forced deportations of commonwealth citizens had been taking place in earnest - current estimates are that 7600 such deportations have taken place since 2010, usually at the hands of private security teams such as G4S using leg and waist restraints on the deportees (https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/7-600-deported-to-commonwealth-nations-on-charter-flights-since-2010-1-4726625).
Nothing short of the issuing of British passports and complete and unconditional citizenship to those people would suffice as repair. On the 23rd April, the government was forced to make this promise and made the decision to do so, with the scandal showing no signs of disappearing. Whether this comes to fruition remains to be seen as promises of dignitary for the dispossessed are rarely followed through - a recent example being the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, the majority of whom were migrants of colour, who one year on have still not been rehoused despite promises from the local and national government. Significant stress and humiliation has already been suffered by those Windrush children who believed that Britain was their home, having been denied re-entry, the possibility of renting properties and urgent life-saving healthcare, among other things. However, while this proposition squares a circle for liberal tendencies, the question remains whether there can be any liberatory potential for either the Caribbean diaspora in the U.K. or for the Caribbean itself in the offer of citizenship for Caribbean peoples to a country whose existence depends on relations of dependency and the maintenance of inequality.
Perhaps what is needed instead is an entirely new idea of global citizenship within a decolonial framework of geopolitical understanding that recognises the history of empire, its legacy, the development of racism as a colonial disciplinary tool, and repair that first focuses on justice for the crimes against humanity meted out by the British Empire, under a strengthened international law that is not adjudicated by the same powers that committed the crimes in the first place. With up to two thirds of Caribbean heritage people living in the diaspora, many of whom still maintain a strong connection to 'back home' and whose relationship (both cultural, social and financial) with the islands is critical for the development of the Caribbean, what if, rather than courting Arab financiers with offers of citizenship by investment, Caribbean governments offered right of return to the diaspora and their children who are being left in the dubious position of denizen in Britain? What if a new conception of global citizenship left the need for the term 'migrant' behind entirely?