ONE question, and your life, as you know it, is over. Imagine being a Windrush citizen – and let us never forget, that they are citizens; even the Home Office does not dispute that they are here legally. You are living your life in the UK, enjoying community, creating a career, building a home, having a family – children, grandchildren. Effectively, everything that most of us take for granted as essential parts of who we are, the life we have.
But hiding just out of sight, just waiting to tear into your reality and destroy it all, is a question. A dreadfully, terrifyingly ordinary question.
READ MORE: Petition launched to prevent mother being deported from Scotland
It all ends; it can all be taken from you, if someone looks at you then pauses thoughtfully, and asks: “You are allowed to be here, aren’t you?”
If that happens, it’s all over. Unless you can produce 200 pieces of documentary proof to the Home Office, four separate documents for each of your 50-odd years in the UK, everything you took for granted about your life here has ended.
And by “it’s all over”, I mean this: your landlord will (must) evict you; your employer will (must) fire you immediately and without notice; your driver’s licence will be cancelled, and your bank accounts frozen. You will not be allowed hospital treatment for things as serious as chemotherapy unless you pay tens of thousands of pounds upfront, presumably from your frozen accounts. Even if you provide appropriate documentary evidence to the bank, they are not allowed to release your funds. This is not hyperbole; this is the standard “your right to stay has been refused” letter from the Home Office. I’ve been shown several examples.
You will be homeless, penniless and unemployed, pursued by the Home Office’s contracted bounty hunters until you leave the UK and your family behind. This, in the country where you have perfectly legally built your life for the past half a century. The country that actually invited you here, as part of the UK’s recruitment call for workers to aid industrial recovery after the war.
The UK has traditionally relied on its coastline to manage immigration, but now, the fortress is within. As you walk through your life, you are surrounded by agents of UK Visas and Immigration. Landlords, GPs, employers, banks, hospitals, even dentists; they are all checking your immigration status. And if anybody stops to ask you The Question, your life as you know it has ended.
And that’s not even the worst problem about the treatment of the Windrush citizens, which I’ll get to shortly.
Theresa May said in 2012 that she would be creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants. As a result, the Home Office has deported Windrush citizens “by mistake”, as admitted by both the Minister of State for Immigration and the Home Secretary this week.
There are very few people who will be able to understand how these persecuted innocents must now feel. They have had their lives of half a century ripped up, their careers, homes, and family links destroyed, and sent to a country where in many cases they have no family, connections or support networks.
These victims must now be given much more than a statement from the PM’s spokesman that it is a “matter of regret” if their lives had been disrupted (what on Earth does he mean, “if”?!). Their lives have been shattered by the Home Office, carrying out stated policy. At the very least, they must be offered free relocation back to the UK, housing and job assistance, so that they have at least a chance to rebuild some of that which has been so cavalierly taken from them.
Instead, the UK Government’s advice is as follows: “Try to be ‘Jamaican’ – use local accents and dialect (overseas accents can attract unwanted attention)”. Yes, that really is expressed Government policy. It’s on the UK Government’s website in a guide called “Coming Home to Jamaica” for deportees and “voluntary” returns.
I said earlier I’d get to the worst problem, and here it is: you are all Windrush citizens.
They are here legally. So are you. They have passed every test that is required for them to remain here. So have you. Even the Home Office does not contend that they have done anything wrong; the same, no doubt, applies to you. There is very little difference, legally, between a Windrush citizen and the UK population at large. Windrush citizens who have contacted the Home Office to “regularise” their status and gone in for an interview, have been detained and deported. Some are in detention even now.
So, why not you? Ask yourself The Question. Try to comply with the Home Office requirement: Home Office officials are demanding to “see a minimum of one, but preferably four, pieces of documentary evidence for every year spent in the UK”. I know it says a minimum of one, but when the Home Office says “preferably four”, I also know from bitter experience that three will not be sufficient.
For myself, I couldn’t produce anything from my first year apart from my birth certificate. I’d fall at the first hurdle, as would 99 per cent of us. Which I fear is the point.
Could you endure being asked The Question?
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