Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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СКАЧАТЬ as consumers they were helping keep the Empire alive. Racial superiority and all its ideas of differing humanity seeped into popular culture: adverts for household goods as mundane as soap or cocoa were marketed on images that showed black people as inferior to whites.¹⁸

      But race was not only about skin colour or physical features. After visiting a Warsaw ghetto in 1949 and witnessing the treatment of Jewish people in Poland, the preeminent sociologist and author W.E.B. Du Bois concluded that the global colour line – which he’d understood at the beginning of the 1900s as the way black and brown people were segregated and treated differently because of their skin colour – was ‘not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics’. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.’ The widely disseminated idea that there are ancestral differences between groups of people which determine people’s abilities, instincts and ways of being, then, was not only denoted by skin colour.¹⁹

      This thinking shaped the ways migrants have been perceived in recent history. Immigration hasn’t always been top of the political agenda; neither has there been a single, uniform treatment of the diverse groups of migrants, but certain groups have been marked out and racialised as different, unwanted and even threatening. These ideas, targeted specifically at Jewish migrants, formed the backdrop of the UK’s first modern immigration controls.

      Escaping pogroms and riots in Eastern Europe and anti-Jewish policies in Russia, at the end of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Jewish migrants were arriving in England. Antisemitism has a long history in this country; Jews, along with Roman Catholics, didn’t have the same rights as Protestants until the nineteenth century.²⁰ But these people, mostly orthodox in their views, were poorer and less anglicised than the existing Jewish population; with their arrival, the Jewish working class grew in size and the existing occupational and cultural profile of Jewish people in England radically changed.²¹

      ‘Immigrant’ and ‘Jew’ became interchangeable, and ‘concerns’ exploded about the supposed social ills that Jewish migrants brought with them to East London, one of the principal areas where they settled.²² Politicians claimed the country’s identity would be diluted by their presence, and The East London Advertiser attacked Jewish people as incompatible with the English way of life: ‘People of any other nation, after being in England for only a short time, assimilate themselves with the native race and by and by lose nearly all their foreign trace. But the Jews never do. A Jew is always a Jew.’ In 1906, one writer in the weekly socialist newspaper the Clarion described Jewish people coming into the country as ‘a poison injected into the national veins’. ²³

      Arriving during economic downturn, in language eerily similar to contemporary arguments that migrants undercut wages and change UK culture, Edward Troup, then Home Office permanent secretary, claimed that ‘large numbers of aliens from Eastern Europe who had settled in east London and in other populous centres had lowered the wages in some of the unorganised trades to starvation point and their habits had a demoralising effect in the crowded areas in which they settled.’²⁴

      The UK’s first ever substantial legislation to deal with immigration – the Aliens Act 1905 – was aimed at limiting the number of Jewish people, as well as the number of poor people, coming into the country. And, so, class and race met, as they so often do, in the reasoning behind immigration ‘controls’. Foreign nationals were forced to register with the police and there were limits on where they could live. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 stipulated that people who wanted to become British citizens had to have ‘good character’ and ‘an adequate knowledge of the English language’.

      The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1918 then gave the home secretary the right to rescind naturalisation certificates given to German citizens and barred any enemy from being naturalised in the ten years after the end of the war.²⁵ Restrictions that had been applied to certain migrants were extended during what would become the period between the two World Wars; the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 required all Jewish ‘aliens’ to carry ID cards that prevented them from taking certain jobs, made it illegal for them to promote industrial action, and dictated that they must tell authorities if they would be away from home for more than two weeks.²⁶

      It wasn’t only Jewish people who were the focus of government attention. The 1919 Act also legalised different rates of pay for British seamen along the lines of race. Between the First and Second World Wars, the government tried to keep out Asian and black seamen arriving at UK ports. Fears of a mixed race population helped drive the restrictions introduced in 1925: British subjects of colour who landed in ports across the country had to register themselves and clock in with officials if they were going to move; all the while the possibility of deportation loomed over them.²⁷ This signalled what was to come in the following decades; the racial categories created during colonialism underpinned the debate and they would continue to do so for years to come.

      Desperate to retain global status as the British Empire was crumbling in front of them and determined to continue an economically exploitative relationship with colonies and former colonies where possible, politicians embraced the idea of the Commonwealth. Through this organisational vehicle they claimed that the Empire was naturally evolving into a multiracial collection of countries.²⁸ In this telling of history, colonial independence could be cast not as a radical change driven by anti-colonial movements but as a planned transformation that signalled the UK’s benevolence and adaptability. The 1948 British Nationality Act was part of this plan.

      Clement Attlee’s Labour government cobbled together the legislation that would keep a semblance of imperial unity through open borders. This, the first definition of British citizenship, gave people from colonies and former colonies British nationality rights; they could be known as either British subjects or Commonwealth citizens. It didn’t hand out any new privileges, but wrote into law the rights these people already had and created a check against any withdrawal of them.²⁹ What the government really wanted was to make it easy for people to move between the euphemistically named ‘old Commonwealth’ countries – otherwise known as the ‘white dominions’ – to come to the UK even if they were developing their own forms of citizenship laws. That is, to allow white people from Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to move to the UK.³⁰

      And so despite the supposed ‘open door’ policy, people of colour from the colonies and former colonies weren’t welcome in the UK. Politicians outsourced the border regime. Through the 1950s, Labour’s official position was opposition to ‘controls’, but at the beginning of the decade, Attlee’s government brought together a cabinet committee to look into how the immigration of ‘coloured people from the British Colonial Territories’ could be checked.³¹

      By 1952, both Tory and Labour governments had implemented clandestine processes to keep out people of colour. They intervened in the market to raise the price of low-cost tickets on transatlantic crossings and they pressured colonial governments to limit who they issued passports to – a practice used even during the height of Empire, when the government was working with agencies abroad to make it harder for people to get the travel documents they needed to enter the UK.

      When Jamaica refused to fall into line, the UK government made a film to be aired in the Caribbean, which took footage from the bitterly cold 1947–48 winter edited with images of out-of-work immigrants living in poor accommodation, to discourage people from coming. In India and Pakistan, the UK High Commissioner publicised the supposed difficult conditions of life in the UK in newspapers.³²

      So, when Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, Essex, in 1948, eleven Labour MPs wasted no time in registering their unhappiness. ‘An influx of coloured СКАЧАТЬ