It's the Real News Network.
I'm Greg Wilpert coming to you from Quito, Ecuador.
Britain's Home Secretary Amber Rudd was forced to resign last Monday.
The reason for her resignation had to do with a growing scandal involving the treatment
of tens of thousands, some say even hundreds of thousands, of longtime immigrants to the
UK.
That is, back in November the Guardian newspaper began a series of reports about the problems
that the so-called Windrush generation of immigrants, mostly from the Caribbean, specifically
from Jamaica, have been having in obtaining government services, and were in some cases
were being declared illegal immigrants even though they had been living in Britain for
many decades.
As the scandal unfolded it became clear that these Windrush generation immigrants, named
after one of the ships that brought them to the UK, are in the UK legally, even though
they were never given the opportunity to prove their immigration status or apply for citizenship.
It was the Conservative government, instead, that had changed the policies recently and
made life more difficult for these immigrants.
Joining me to discuss the so-called Windrush scandal is Luke de Noronha, a graduate student
finishing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Oxford University, and is researching deportations
from the UK to Jamaica.
He also teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Thanks for joining us here today, Luke.
Thanks for having me.
So first of all, tell us more about the Windrush generation.
I mean, who are they exactly and why are they having all of these problems of a sudden with
government agencies, and in some cases even being declared illegal immigrants?
Sure.
So the Windrush, as you mentioned, the Windrush was the, the boat in 1948 that brought about
500 Caribbean migrants to the UK, many of whom, all of whom, in fact, were technically
citizens.
Citizens in that they were subjects of the Commonwealth.
So the Windrush is the name we gave to the kind of post-war migrants who changed and
made Britain a multiracial country.
So unlike the U.S. we're not contributing to immigration until post-war years, and so
the Windrush generation, those who arrived after, after the war.
The Windrush generation are specifically those who arrived from 1948, when the Windrush actually
docked, to 1973.
And anyone who arrived , who was in the UK before 1973, was granted indefinite leave
and permanent residence, right to remain in the UK regardless of any other circumstances.
The Windrush generation now, due to later policies from the Conservative government,
are facing questions over their right to be in the UK, and sometimes being detained, threatened
with deportation, denied access to healthcare.
And that's the scandal, I suppose, is that people who've arrived and who've been here
from before 1973, who have a right to remain in the UK, are being treated as though they
don't.
So you recently wrote an article that was published on the website of Verso Books, in
which you argue that those who are declared illegal is something that's constantly up
for debate, and that the line between so-called legal and illegal is always being redrawn.
Explain to us how this happens, and what the consequences are.
I suppose in this example what you have a language which is quite new.
So the Windrush generation being those who arrived before 1973.
British law around immigration is quite complicated, partly because we are an imperial nation whose
membership in terms of citizenship was always defined in relation to the empire.
And so what happened after the war is a slow kind of exclusion of the majority of people
who lived outside of Britain from citizenship rights in the UK.
So what I mean by illegality being a thing that's produced and changes over time is that
the Windrush generation were subjects of the Commonwealth at a time before British citizenship
even existed, in national terms.
And more recently what we see is that generation of people who moved to the UK being asked
questions under laws and provisions that simply didn't exist before, around access to healthcare
and benefits, with new kinds of conditionality that weren't there before.
So what we're seeing is illegality, being an illegal immigrant, being produced through
specific and contemporary laws, which changes in many ways.
So these were Windrush migrants who were turned into illegal immigrants based on the UK's
hostile environment policy.
Yes, I was actually going to ask you about that next.
That is, this hostile environment policy.
What is the purpose behind it, and how far does it reach?
I mean, obviously it doesn't, presumably it doesn't just affect the Windrush generation,
but a lot of other immigrants to the UK.
Yeah, definitely.
So the hostile environment is a, Theresa May, before being prime minister of the UK, was
the home secretary in control of immigration and the police.
And she promised when she was home secretary to create a, quote, a really hostile environment
for illegal immigrants.
And the idea was that people who have no legal status in the UK should be incentivised to
leave through limiting their access to all public services.
Which means, effectively, turning all of us into border guards.
That is, checks along with the driving licence authority and banks.
Teachers and universities, doctors being required to ask people for passports.
We have a national health service in the UK which everyone is very proud of, and yet now
we're seeing controls on who can access health at the point of service.
So the hostile environment is that set of policies in which the border is internalized,
and we're all required to be border guards.
But what's, what that's meant is that people who do have rights should have rights, who've
been here for many years, are caught up in a system of kind of everyday, everywhere policing.
Which is not dissimilar, and in fact mimics in lots of ways U.S. policies around, I think
it's Secure Communities that that was based on information sharing.
But what the hostile environment does is internalize the border and make it the responsibility
of all faces of the state.
And so of course sometimes that, that captures, catches out people who may not have legal
status.
But legal status is a complicated thing, and often people are semi-compliant with some
bits of the law and not with others.
The Windrush generation, the people who, that the British public have found sympathy for
recently because they're seen to be part of the nation, but of course you have the hostile
environment affects legal migrants, citizens, especially racialized ethnic minority citizens,
and also those migrants who do not have legal status.
It's actually kind of refreshing, I think, that in the UK they use a term that more accurately
reflects what's going on, hostile environment, whereas in the U.S. they use a euphemism,
such as secure communities.
But anyway, I wanted to ask you also about what do you make of the reaction from the
Labour Party to this scandal?
We have a short clip from Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament, where he addressed, this was shortly
before the Home Secretary Amber Rudd had to resign.
She knew full well of the problems the Windrush generation were facing.
At last she's been forced to act upon it.
Yet we now know that when she took over from her predecessor, her intent was to harden
this cruel and misdirected policy, pledging to do so ruthlessly.
A report last month by immigration officials stated the hostile environment measures were
not even having the desired effect.
The current Home Secretary inherited a failing policy and made it worse.
So what do you make of the Labor Party's position on all this?
Well, it's complicated.
At first I thought I was happy with the Labor Party making, making an issue of this.
And I do think that in the UK we have to be pleased that we have a genuine left opposition
to the Tory party, which we haven't had for a long time.
So I'm supportive of the Labor Party's policies in lots of ways.
But the problem has been that the issue of Windrush was, first of all, it became a big
scandal.
Then it was broadened out to talk more broadly about the hostile environment, and then that
seems to have been retracted somewhat.
And so Labour, key Labour politicians who've been very good on this issue have been making
a very hard distinction between the Windrush migrants who should not be subject to such
dishonor, and then illegal immigrants, who the Labour Party has promised to bear down
on.
The Labour Party has promised to be tough on illegal immigration.
And this is, unfortunately, more of the same consensus on a kind of demonising of migration,
with no real understanding of how illegalities produce, all the complex ways in which people
live their lives across lines of citizenship, which of course is the same as in the U.S.,
in a context of mass migration, and then a kind of illegality coming down between families,
communities, neighbourhoods, classrooms.
So I'm a bit disappointed with how the issue hasn't been broadened out and taken up into
a broader critique of the racist politics underneath the hostile environment.
And I feel there's been somewhat of a lazy, kind of lazy kind of retraction of a radical
politics from the Labour Party in relation to immigration more broadly.
But yeah, I mean, that's my take.
Of course I also want to ask you about, just finally before we finish, about the new Home
Secretary, Sajid Javid, who is himself a second-generation Pakistani.
And just what do you think, or what can you expect from someone like him, who's still
a member, obviously, of the Conservative Theresa May government?
I would say absolutely nothing.
I think this is the worst, the very worst of a kind of representative version of racial
politics.
It makes no difference that he's a second-generation Pakistani immigrant.
In fact, that's the very reason why he's been promoted to the role, and it's the way in
which he sold his own entry into the role.
His, I thought what if it had been my parents.
He has no idea, actually, what it means to be an illegalized migrant, or to face deportation,
or to lose his loved ones through detention or deportation.
He has no idea.
He's an investment banker, and a very hardline Tory who is so incredibly aggressively against
all forms of immigration and welfare.
So I think this is really a tactical maneuver which we should see straight through, and
I have no hope that any Tory politician, least of all, least of all him, will really change
the immigration system in a way which will be humane.
OK.
Well, we'll have to leave it there for now.
I was speaking to Luke de Noronha, a graduate student in anthropology at Oxford University
researching deportations from the UK to Jamaica.
Thanks, Luke, for joining us again.
Thank you.
Cheers.
And thank you for joining the Real News Network.