The purpose of this paper is that to highlight what I see as racist, unjust and inhumane elements in Britains immigration system and the culture of secrecy surrounds it. The permanent residents (who has indefinite leave to remain), central to this discussion not the illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers. Also immigrations treatments of people coming over to Britain for a range of other reasons and with papers and visas they expect to be accepted have been highlighted.
Mainly my argument is, compared with other countries, UK is more suspicious of all people entering the country and they discriminate against people from underdeveloped countries. I have read and quoted from various books in the Immigration subject area. Mainly, Ms. Catriona J. MacKenzies dissertation Africans & UK Immigration Controls for the degree of Masters in Social Work & Social Policy, which has been submitted to the University of Glasgow in 1995 greatly helped me to construct this paper.
I also conducted a number of interviews in UK and Turkey with individuals with immigration difficulties. I also made extensive use of the Glasgow University Library. Citizenship The membership of individuals in modern democratic societies is marked by the status of citizenship. Those who belong in a given nation-state have documents certifying their membership. More importantly, citizens possess a wide range of civil, political and social rights. The reality has always been somewhat different.
Most nation-states have had groups on their territory not considered capable of belonging, and therefore either denied citizenship or alternatively forced to go through a process of cultural assimilation in order to belong. Moreover, even those with formal membership have often been denied some of the rights vital to citizenship, so that they have not fully belonged. Discrimination based on class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion and other criteria has always meant that some people could not be full citizens. Securing the participation of previously excluded groups has been seen as the key to democratisation.
Nazism and the Final Solution temporarily stigmatised racial-biological thinking after 1945. However, the New Racism that emerged in the 1970s evaded the opprobrium of biological racism and eugenics by superficially relocating difference away from phenotype and genes and on to culture. This has had dramatic effect on nature and appearance of racism in Britain. By camouflaging hereditary qualities as cultural inheritance, it became possible for mainstream politicians to inject racism back into debates about nationality and citizenship.
The New Racism has made citizenship itself the site of struggle over conceptions of the nation and national identity. In the new discourse of racism, culture was taken to define the differences between the British and non-European immigrants. Ethnicity, religion, language and customs were held to render immigrants unassimilable without it ever being necessary to mention racial types. The shifting locus of racism reflected the new realities in British society: the virtual cessation of primary immigration after 1971 on the one hand, and the consolidation of ethnic minority communities on the other.
These communities, on their own and assisted by certain race relations legislation, as well as policies of central and local government, began to assert their identities and ethnic agendas. The spear-carriers of white, ethnic nationalism found a new battlefield in multiculturalism. Cultural differences relocated the arena of conflict away from the margins of the nation and to its very core: the constitution, law, education and national religion. Citizenship, no less than national identity and nationality, has now acquired racially polarized meanings.
The current emphasis on the family as the training ground for citizenship and building a block of the nation has racial implications, too. Black family life has been systematically stigmatised and declared inadequate. The implication is that dysfunctional or incomplete black families produce bad citizens members of the underclass. Hence, citizenship again becomes divisive, racial concept rather than an inclusive, universal one. Overt linkages between nation, culture, religion and race are present in education policy too.
The 1988 Education Reform Act prescribes the teaching of British history to all pupils and places on schools an obligation to provide an act of Christian worship. Successive ministers responsible for recent education policy have depicted this as necessary for the creation of a homogeneous population of loyal citizens. Conversely, Muslim schools are characterized as a breeding ground for dual loyalty and Fifth Columns as well as an alien fundamentalism. This dangerous recasting of citizenship in the light of a changing sense of nationhood and national identity has not been ameliorated by Britains entry into Europe.
Rather, party politics have led to an accentuation of national chauvinism and the reiteration of a narrow sense of Britishness defined against a farcically demonised Europe. British governments have sought to project on to the European Union their own restrictionist immigration policies and have supported an exclusive, Eurocentric definition of European identity and membership. Sadly, it seems as if the idea of a Europe of diversity is giving way to the notion of European homogeneity behind closely guarded frontiers.
British politicians may yet succeed in making a Little Europe in the image of Little England. Britain after the World War II, like most western European countries, was faced with a chronic shortage of labour. This shortage was in some measure alleviated by the half a million or so refugees, displaced persons and POWs who were admitted to Britain between 1946-1951. Unlike most other European countries, however, Britain was in a position to turn to an alternative and comparatively uncompetitive source of labour in its colonies and ex-colonies in Asia and the Caribbean.
Colonialism had already under-developed these countries and thrown up a reserve army of labour which now waited in readiness to serve the needs of the metropolitan economy. And it is to these vast and cheap resources of labour that Britain turned in the 1950s. The periods of economic expansion led to a rise in immigration, periods of recession to a decline and this sensitiveness of supply to demand characterized the whole stop-go period of the 1950s. But if the free market economy decided the numbers of immigrants, economic growth and the colonial legacy determined the nature of the work they were put to.
It was inevitable that in a period of full employment the indigenous worker would move upwards into better paid jobs, skilled apprenticeships, training programmes etc. leaving the dirty, hard, low-paid work to immigrant labour. The jobs which coloured immigrants found themselves in were the largely unskilled and low status ones which white labour was unavailable or which white workers were unwilling to fill. And since the opportunities for such work obtained chiefly in the already overcrowded conurbations, immigrants came to occupy some of the worst housing in the country.
The situation was further exacerbated by the exorbitant rents charged by slum landlords. In the course of time the immigrants became ghetto-ized and locked into the decaying areas of the inner city. Everyone made money on the immigrant worker from the big-time capitalist to the slum landlord- from exploiting his labour, his colour, his customs, his culture. He himself has cost the country nothing. He had been paid for by the country of his origin reared and raised, as capitalist under-development had willed it, for the labour markets of Europe.
If anything, he represented a saving for Britain of all the expense involved in feeding and clothing and housing him till he had come of working age. But capital and the state were concerned with the maximisation of profit, not with the alleviation of social need. Race Relations Act: The government introduced the first piece of anti-discriminatory legislation in the form of Race Relations Act of 1965, but this was a half-hearted affair which merely forbade discrimination in places of public resort and, by default, encouraged discrimination in everything else: housing, employment etc.
The incorporation, in the Act, of a clause to penalise incitement to racial hatred turned out to be more useful in imprisoning blacks (and right-wing extremists) than in arresting the exalted nativism of the Rt. Hon. Enoch Powell, Ronald Bell Q. C. and others of their ilk and silk. The discrimination provisions of the Race Relation Act were to be implemented by the Race Relation Board and its local conciliation committees. But the concern of integration during this period related more to the Asians than to the West Indians.
The latter, it was felt, had largely been brought up to regard themselves as British, whereas Pakistanis and Indians showed almost no interest in being integrated. The Asians, with their different cultures and customs and language and dress, their extended families and sense of community, and their peculiar preference to stay with their own kind, were a society apart. But they were also a people who were industrious and responsible, anxious to educate themselves.
They may not be assimilable, but they were certainly made for integration a parallel society to be accommodated in a pluralist set-up. The Race Relations board with National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants did not succeed in even getting that integration programme off the ground. The Board was virtually non-starter, so feeble and narrow were the provisions of the 1965 Act. The National Committee discovered discrimination everywhere it went but was frustrated into educating people out of their attitudes.
Education in school and out of school, education of adults as well as children, education of newcomers as well as indigenous population, education through conferences, through committee work, through social activities, through the Press dragged on its first annual report in the tones of a forlorn manifesto. Hence in 1966 both bodies jointly commissioned the PEP (Political and Economic Planning) to investigate the extent of racial discrimination.
Its report, published a year later, produced evidence to show what everybody knew: that racial discrimination varied in extent from the massive to the substantial. The profound effects of racism were already showing in the growing militancy of the West Indian community. Increasing police harassment, particularly of West Indians, mounting discrimination in employment, housing and immigration sparked off militant struggles in the Caribbean community. The state was faced, against all its convictions, with an unassimilable black community.
The West Indians were not a part of British society after all. They even proclaimed that they had a culture and a tradition and a history of its own. They rejected British values and British culture. And worse, especially for the educationalists who had suddenly come upon the discovery that the West Indian child could not/would not speak English English: they rejected the English language itself. Once, as slaves, when they have been forced to accept the white mans language, they had corrupted it so skilfully as to make it unintelligible to the slave master.
Now they sought to blacken the language suffuse it with their own darkness and liberate it from the presence of the oppressor. And out of that assertion of themselves was springing an anti-capitalist ideology and a politics of revolution. They posed a problem from within British society they posed the problems of it. They could not be assimilated and they could not, like the Asians, be integrated. They were a canker in the body politic. The body politic itself was threatened. The need for integration and for anti-discriminatory legislation had assumed a new urgency.
The 1968 Act extended the scope of the 1965 Act to include discrimination in employment (with some exceptions), housing (with some exceptions) credit and insurance facilities and places of public resort. But the breadth of its concerns was believed by the unenforceability of its provisions. The Board would have to rely almost entirely on conciliation to obtain redress. It had no powers of enforcement but could resort to the courts, in extreme cases, to obtain an injunction restraining the defendant from further discriminatory practices.
It could order the payment of special damages and damages for the loss of opportunity. Basically the Act was not an act but an attitude. The 1968 Act also re-formed the existing organisation, the NCCI, to create the Community Relations Commission in order to complement the work of the Race Relations Board. The Commissions task as defined by the Act was to promote harmonious community relations, to co-ordinate national action to this end through its local community relations councils, to disseminate information about matters affecting minority groups and to advise the Home Secretary.
In theory, the Commission attempted to combat racial discrimination, the Board to penalise it. In practice, they were both educational and advisory and tended to overlap each other. In effect, they were to one degree or another both instruments of mediation between sections of the ruling class, between the sectional interests and the blacks and, on the national level, between the whites and blacks. In its seven years of existence the Commissions task was over. The Race Relations Bill (February 1976) sees that its work is good and that its work is done.
It has taught the white power structure to accept the blacks and it has taught the blacks to accept the white power structure. It has successfully taken politics out of the black struggle and returned it to rhetoric and nationalism on the one hand and to state on the other. It has, together with the Board, created a black bourgeoisie, especially West Indian (the Asian bourgeoisie was already in the wings), to which the state can now hand over control of black dissidents in general and black youth in particular. Britain has moved from institutional racism to domestic neo-colonialism.
In terms of the larger picture, what has been achieved in half a decade is the accommodation of West Indian militant politics within the framework of social democracy. The Asians had already settled into the cultural pluralist set-up ordained for them by the state as far back as a decade ago. The strategy of the state in relation to the Asians had been to turn cultural antagonism into cultural pluralism in relation to the West Indians, to turn political antagonism into political pluralism. But there was still the second generation. All the other blacks had been found a place within the system, but the young blacks stood outside it.
As though to confirm the dialectics of history they, the British born, carry the politics of their slave ancestry. And so it is to them that the state now turns its attention in the Race Relations Bill of February 1976. For, the anxiety of the state about the rebellious black youth stems not from the rhetoric of professional black militants, but from the fear of the mass politics that it may generate in the black under-class and in that other discriminated minority the migrant workers and perhaps in the working class as a whole particularly in a time of massive unemployment and urban decay.
The Bills intention is not just to outlaw discrimination but to carry the fight against discrimination in most areas of society. And more significantly, it means to enforce the law. The law is no longer the instrument of education, it is an instrument of compulsion. More, it will redress the balance of discrimination in some areas by discriminating in favour of the disadvantaged blacks.
And that is why the Government believes that it is vital to our well-being as a society to tap these reservoirs of resilience, initiative and vigour in the racial minority groups and not to allow them to lie unused or to be deflected into negative protest on account of arbitrary and unfair discriminatory practices. Hence the new Race Relations Commission which replaced both the Board and the Commission will have major strategic role in enforcing the law in the public interest.
However that interest is defined as the public interest or the national interest or, unashamedly, the ruling class interest- it is certainly the interest of capital. For capital requires racism not for racisms sake but for the sake of capital. Hence at a certain level of economic activity (witness the colonies) it finds it more profitable to abandon the idea of superiority of race in order to promote the idea of the superiority of capital. Racism dies in order that capital might survive.
