Following a number of high-profile cases including that of Paulette Wilson which we wrote about here, advocacy groups and Caribbean diplomats have asked the UK government to exhibit more compassion towards persons who came to the UK with their parents as children and who may have unresolved residency and citizenship status.
A sizeable number of such persons have been detained and threatened with deportation despite living in the UK for all or most of their adult lives. Many are now senior citizens and were unaware that they are required to formally become naturalised as British citizens. As a result, their residency status has meant they face problems accessing pension, housing, health care and work. Further, new evidence of harsh treatment by the Home Office has shone a light on this issue.
Those Caribbean diplomats calling for better treatment include Guy Hewitt, the High Commissioner of Barbados in London. Many are concerned that persons who may be eligible may become reluctant to regularise their situation because of the treatment Fraser received at the hands of the Home Office, or they fear they may be detained or deported. The Jamaican High Commissioner to London, Seth George Ramocan, noted that the system one treats those accused as guilty before proven innocent rather than the other way around.
The incorrect assumption can cause irreparable harm to those affected. Some people have become homeless as a result of the difficulties they have faced in proving their right to remain in the UK. While cases of detention before removal are rare, such cases are not unique. Lack of documentary evidence is often the problem as the rules around immigration were less stringent in the past. The burden of proving that residency that predates the 1971 Immigration Act is on the individual, and it is often hard to gather a detailed paper trail showing school and employment records.
The diplomats have asked UK government to exercise a more compassionate approach.
New evidence of the harsh treatment carried out by the Home Office emerged this week when officials said they “now accepted” that Anthony Bryan, 60, who has spent five weeks in immigration detention centres, was in fact “lawfully present in the UK”. Bryan, a grandfather who has lived in the UK for 52 years, spent two terms in detention and was booked on a flight to Jamaica, a country he left in 1965, when he was eight, and has not visited since last November. The decorator lost his job in 2015 because he was unable to prove he was not in the UK illegally.
“These are not people who are seeking to be illegal. They came to contribute to the wellbeing of the UK”
Seth George Ramocan, Jamaican High Commissioner to London
Bryan said he was relieved but angry at his treatment, which has left him heavily in debt because he was prevented from working for almost three years. Hewitt and fellow high commissioners have raised the broader issue with the Foreign Office, urging officials to take a more humane approach in cases like Bryan’s and Wilson’s.
Diplomats from former Commonwealth countries have organised outreach meetings in areas where there were high levels of immigration from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s to educate and inform people about the requirement to become naturalised.
