CARIBBEAN MIGRANTS
ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Windrush scandal reveals racist UK immigration policy
A recent scandal in Britain relating to Caribbean immigrants reminded me why, after spending 11 years in the country getting a great education, I never thought of staying a day longer. Though largely sheltered from British society’s insidious structural racism by being confined to the spires of ivory towers, I noted, for example, the Macpherson report of 1999-2000 that declared — something ethnic minorities had known for decades — that the Metropolitan police suffered from "institutionalised racism." In the decade after Macpherson, African and Asian minorities suffered 1.5-million more stop-and-searches than white Britons. The "Windrush generation" are Caribbean nationals whose parents migrated to Britain between 1948 and 1971, welcomed by the government to fill post-war labour shortages and guaranteed the right to British citizenship. Many who had travelled as infants on their parents’ passports did not have travel documents. In the past four years, the British Home Office, acting ...
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