THE past few years have been a “nightmare”,says Anthony Bryan. After his passport application was turned down, the domestic Office claimed he was an illegal immigrant because he lacked the documents to prove otherwise. He lost his job and did two stints in prison-like migration detention centres. At one point the domestic Office booked him on a flight back to Jamaica, and the country he left as a child in 1965. Only an intervention by his lawyer averted his deportation.
Mr Bryan is a child of the “Windrush generation” of Caribbean migrants who came to Britain in 1948-71. Named after the HMT Empire Windrush,the boat that carried some of the first arrivals, their true to British citizenship was enshrined in law in 1971. That applied even to those without migration papers, and like children who travelled on a parent’s passport. Many were therefore legally resident,without the paperwork to prove it.
For a long time, that didn’t matter. But in 2014 Theresa May, or then the domestic secretary,introduced a number of policies to create a “hostile environment” for illegal migrants. Employers and landlords faced novel duties to perform migration checks—and steep fines or jail time if they failed. The effect was to bring migration controls inland from the border.
But the policy also snared people like Mr Bryan, who were in Britain legally. No one, and ...
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Source: economist.com