‘In the cruel shadow of Empire’: A case study on the illegalisation, migrantisation and sub-citizenship of the Windrush Katya Lee-Browne Human Rights Bachelor Thesis 15 Credits Spring 2020 Supervisor: Dimosthenis Chatzoglakis 1 V’ahavta - Aurora Le vins Morales Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up, when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders, teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies, recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire: Another world is possible. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the so-called ‘Windrush scandal’: a systematic case of mistaken identity which erroneously misconstrued Britons of Carribean descent as being in the UK illegally. The Windrush were denied rights they were legally entitled to, were detained, threatened with deportation, and in some cases, deported. A range of mechanisms present in Britis h government and society which legitimised anti-immigration policies are identified and used to examine the experience of the Windrush and the violation of their rights. This thesis uses citizenship as a starting point for examining its relevance to human rights and concludes that the contemporary scaling back of protections surrounding citizenship have far-reaching consequences for citizens and non-citizens alike. Word count: 12,196 Key words: Windrush scandal; illegalisation; sub-citizenship; citizenship; migrantisation 3 1. Introduction 5 1.1 Terminology 5 1.2 Previous research 5 1.3 Research problem and aim 6 1.4 Research question 7 1.5 Relevance to human rights 7 1.6 Delimitations 8 2. Methodology 8 2.1 Material 8 2.2 Method 10 3. Theory 10 3.1 Illegalisation 11 3.2 Migrantisation 11 3.3 Sub-citizenship 12 4. Background 13 4.1 Post-World War II laws 14 4.2 Post-2012 and the ‘hostile environment’ 16 4.3 Media reports 18 4.4 Public opinion 19 5. Analysis 20 5.1 Migrantisation of the Windrush 21 5.1.1 The Commonwealth, multiculturalism and (non)belonging 22 5.2 Illegalisation and deportability of the Windrush 25 5.2.1 Extending borders 26 5.2.2 Attitudes towards ‘illegal’ immigration 27 5.2.3 The convergence of illegalisation and criminality 28 5.3 The Windrush as sub-citizen 30 4 6. Conclusion 33 7. References Error! Bookmark not defined. 5 1. Introduction In the wake of several years of harsher policies attempting to cut irregular migration termed the ‘hostile environment’, 2017-2018 saw Britain in the midst of an unfolding scandal that reached the heart of its politics and society. The Windrush generation, a group of Caribbean Britons named after the SS Windrush which brought them to Britain 1948, found themselves suddenly getting detained and facing other human rights abuses after having lived in the country for years without any difficulty. The policies of the hostile environment were enacted from 2012 onwards by Theresa May as Home Secretary with the aim of “making life intolerable for undocumented migrants and refused asylum seekers so as to force them to leave” (Burnett, 2016, p.44). It operated by outsourcing governmental activities to individ ua ls or companies such as landlords or employers giving them the authority to check people's right to reside in Britain, and accordingly deny them jobs or housing. Having never before been asked to prove their immigration status or citizenship and due to no records of their arrival being kept by the government, the Windrush and their descendants found themselves classified as ‘illegal’ immigrants and were thus denied an array of legal rights. 1.1 Terminology A word on terminology, the word ‘Windrush’ will be used to denote all persons caught up in the scandal as it was not only the original Windrush generation who arrived in 1948, but also their children and grandchildren who have faced the consequences. I also will be using the word illegal in quotations when referring to a person because although people can commit illegal acts, I maintain that no one is intrinsically illegal. Due to the deaths of the Windrush either directly or indirectly linked to the events, I believe it would be remiss to refer to them as survivors rather than victims. I also wish to clarify the term citizenship which is used to refer to a legal status that is based on a relationship of rights and duties between the individual and the state, and which confirms a person’s belonging in a country. 1.2 Previous research The vast majority of previous research encountered while researching for this thesis focuses on the Windrush generation in the 20th century and what their arrival in Britain meant for society in terms of multiculturalism, immigration and integration in terms of race 6 and nationality. Most of this literature looked at the identity of the Windrush generation using various content analyses drawing from an array of material including: media, literature, public discourse, and policies. Only three articles yielded in search results focused on the scandal itself (Quille, 2018); (de Noronha, 2019); (Taylor, 2020) and this research is grounded in fields such as Critical Discourse studies and Criminology, with the latter focusing on race in regards to law enforcement as well as the changing role of immigration law from being largely administrative to punitive. These have been useful to understand where my research can be placed in the body of existing work, but I wish for my thesis to divert from these subjects of study. From this previous research, de Noronha’s work comes closest to that of this thesis: taking the notion of illegalisation and the Windrush scandal as the starting point. But while this is to help him analyse other phenomena pertaining to it, I hope to partake in a deeper analysis of the scandal itself. The older research on the Windrush generation provides a secure grounding for me to incorporate commentary on important issues like multiculturalism and identity, and yet the scarcity of published academic work on the Windrush scandal, due to it only being three years old, provides a gap in knowledge that this thesis hopes to fill by exploring this unique case. 1.3 Research problem and aim The research problem which I take as the starting point of this thesis is the scandal and more specifically, the social and legal categorisation of the Windrush that took place which allowed them to be subjected to human rights violations. The overarching themes that this thesis is concerned with are citizenship, migration, identity and belonging. In regards to citizenship, by providing a historical background of the intricacies of postcolonial citizenship over time, this thesis aims to explore how a group of people, who were for all intents and purposes British citizens, became ‘not British, ‘illegal’ and deportable. Central to my research will be the hostile environment, the series of ever more unwelcoming and anti- immigra tio n policies in Britain which played a large role in the British state erroneously criminalising its own citizens by categorising them as ‘illegal’ migrants. My research is also steered towards looking at attitudes towards immigration, immigrants and multiculturalism and looking to see what part anti-immigration policies played in legitimising certain attitudes towards ‘illegal’ migrants. I am not attempting to conduct a causal research paper to find out why the Windrush scandal happened, so much as conducting a descriptive analysis which 7 aims to facilitate a deeper understanding into how it happened by tracing different factors and mechanisms present in British society and government. It also aims to understand which of these processes needed to be in place for the scandal to be able to happen. As such, the research questions for this paper are as follows: 1.4 Research question How can notions of illegalisation, migrantisation and sub-citizenship facilitate a better understanding of how the Windrush came to experience human rights violations? Sub question: What do the Windrush events demonstrate in regards to the retention and safeguarding of citizenship? 1.5 Relevance to human rights The provision and protection of human rights is generally dependent on citizenship, or the legal belonging to a nation state. Through this social contract, the state’s role is to provide protection for its citizens. By definition, citizenship is based on a form of exclusion; one group has benefits to the detriment of another. The redrawing of citizenship in European nations during the nineteenth century saw not only the rich being divided from poor, and along lines of race, but it also “marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship. and public relief were worthy of recognition and whose were not” (Stoler, 1995, p.8). Citizenship has become a more and more precarious luxury for immigrants and non-citizens which has wide reaching ramifications for all (Rung, 2019). The violations that were endured by the Windrush covered a broad range of social and economic rights including: housing, healthcare, pensions and employment which are all upheld by international human rights legislation, yet the crux of the scandal comes down to the arguably more fundamental issue of civil and political rights which serve as protection from practices such as detainment and forced deportation. The Windrush’s subjection to these rights violations was partly due to a lack of identification documents proving their citizenship. It was not due to any premeditated or active decision taken by the government to purposefully strip them of citizenship, but rather a lack of care which saw them fall from the all important category of citizen into a 8 ‘grey zone’ for which there was no legal construction.