Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control

Subject to Examination

E. Smith,M. Marmo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137280442
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the practice of virginity testing endured by South Asian women who wished to enter Britain between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, and places this practice into a wider historical context. Using recently opened government documents the extent to which these women were interrogated and scrutinized at the border is uncovered.

1

Decolonisation and the Creation of the British Immigration Control System

Since the introduction of immigration controls in Britain in the early 20th century, racially and sexually discriminatory practices have been used by the British authorities to filter incoming migrants according to their level of desirability to the state. This chapter charts the introduction of immigration control legislation in the UK and the development of discriminatory policies that have become more restrictive since the first legislative Act was introduced in 1905. It will be argued that the purpose of controls has been to restrict entry for those considered ‘undesirable’ to the British nation-state and that these controls have imposed rigorous scrutiny upon potential migrants. At the same time, the chapter will show that, despite the aspiration of the authorities to screen and carefully select the migrant intake, the path towards development of the modern immigration control system, with its cornerstone being the Immigration Act 1971, has not been so straightforward and that the legislative process, negotiating between populist anti-immigrant sentiment and other socio-economic, legal, diplomatic and humanitarian concerns, has been haphazard. However, the end result of this has been a bipartisan consensus between the Conservatives and Labour that good race relations can only be maintained through strict immigration control. As Labour MP Roy Hattersley stated in Parliament in March 1965, ‘I believe that unrestricted immigration can only produce additional problems, additional suffering and additional hardship unless some kind of limitation is imposed and continued.’¹

Decolonisation, immigration and the British ‘citizen’

The aim of all of the controls on immigration established by the British government has been to create a legislative cover to filter so-called undesirable migrants entering Britain, predominantly at the cost of other social, economic and humanitarian concerns.² The first modern piece of immigration control legislation passed in Britain was the Aliens Act 1905, which applied to those migrants outside the British Commonwealth, and was based on the primary aim of excluding Eastern European Jews.³ Further legislation followed this Act during the First World War and in the inter-war period in response to concerns that non-naturalised Europeans (predominantly Germans and Austro-Hungarians, but also Italians and other nationalities) presented a security problem. Legislation with a limited scope, focusing on the African, Asian and Caribbean crews (from non-British colonies) that docked in Liverpool, London, Cardiff and Bristol, was passed in the mid-1920s under the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seaman) Order of 1925. Laura Tabili has referred to this Order as ‘the first instance of state-sanctioned race discrimination inside Britain to come to widespread notice’⁴ , but by this time, the Aliens Act had already been in effect for 20 years.

With the non-white colonial population of Britain being limited to between 10,000 and 30,000 people and living only in the major cities, there was not much concern about migration from the colonies during the inter-war period. However, this changed with the introduction of the British Nationality Act in 1948 and the influx of migrants from the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia to fill the post-war labour shortage. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, there was an ongoing debate in Parliament, in the media and amongst the broader British society over the social, economic and political impact of colonial migration upon Britain, with a strong push by many for limits to be placed upon non-white migration.

The end of the Second World War and its destructive wake left Britain with the massive challenge of post-war reconstruction, which demanded a large increase in labour. The labour shortage, intensified by the large-scale emigration of British residents to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia,⁵ was filled primarily by immigrants. Although many women in Britain had been mobilised into war production during the Second World War, the increased employment of women in the workforce was rejected in favour of migrant labour, which was a ‘far cheaper way of meeting the demand for labour’.⁶

In the first years after the war, most of the immigrants who entered Britain were from Europe and Ireland. This included workers recruited from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom were from displaced persons camps, prisoners of war who remained in Britain or, as in the case of Poles, were from the Polish Army that was stationed in Britain at the time. Most of the recruitment was executed in cooperation with the British government’s Department of Labour as a series of restrictions were placed on immigrants from outside the British Commonwealth.

From June 1948 onwards, Britain experienced large-scale immigration of non-white workers from the Commonwealth. The docking of the SS Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948 at Tilbury, carrying 492 (mostly male) West Indians, has come to be recognised as a symbol of the commencement of large-scale black immigration, in turn marking the beginning of a multicultural Britain.⁷ The process of migration from the colonies to Britain was simplified with the British Nationality Act 1948, introduced by the Labour government to highlight the supposed importance of the British Commonwealth. This Act justified the free entry of Commonwealth citizens into Britain, declaring that ‘[e]very person who . . . is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies or . . . is a citizen of [Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, India, Pakistan, Southern Rhodesia and Ceylon] shall by virtue of that citizenship have the status of a British subject’,⁸ retaining the legal and unconditional right to enter, settle and work in Britain.⁹ Conservative MP Sir David Maxwell Fyfe declared, ‘we must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone from every part of our Empire’.¹⁰ The early period of large-scale immigration into Britain had been portrayed by earlier scholars as ‘an age of innocence and lack of concern about black immigration’.¹¹ However, the British Nationality Act also meant a fortified position for Britain to continue its privileged socio-economic relationship with its former colonies. Lydia Lindsey suggests that ‘[t]here was general agreement among British officials that colonial workers were not preferred in the country’,¹² but such concerns were offset by the economic advantages for Britain and its labour market of engaging immigrant labour. This led to a massive number of colonial migrants coming to Britain to seek work. Between 1948 and 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was introduced, over 279,000 West Indians, over 79,000 Indians and over 68,000 Pakistanis travelled to Britain, alongside nearly 19,000 West Africans and nearly 24,000 Cypriots, as well as the massive, but unrecorded, number of Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Rhodesian and South African migrants.¹³

In response to this influx, almost immediately emerged an ‘increasingly racialized debate about immigration . . . focusing on the supposed social problems of having too many black migrants’.¹⁴ It is evident that reversed migration flows were allowed only in the interests of Britain’s white society. As Robert Miles noted, ‘[w]hile no one questioned this principle [of free entry] during the debate’, both sides of government privately agreed that the ‘metropolitan tradition of hospitality could only be sustained if the “non-white races” could be persuaded not to partake of it’.¹⁵

As Kathleen Paul wrote, the British government was ‘never “liberal” with regard to “race and immigration” and indeed tried very hard to prevent the migration of people of colour to the United Kingdom’.¹⁶ During the early 1950s, the government introduced informal controls as the ‘solution’ to its unrestricted immigration policy.¹⁷ Before its defeat in 1951, Labour had ‘instituted a number of covert, and sometimes illegal, administrative measures designed to discourage Black immigration’, which were taken up wholeheartedly by the Conservatives once they assumed power.¹⁸ As a study into the reaction of Churchill’s Conservative government to immigration observed, ‘these ad hoc administrative measures had their limitations and, indeed, some were of questionable legality’.¹⁹ And, as the efforts to prevent further Commonwealth immigration were failing, by the mid-1950s some in government had started to ‘favour restrictive legislation’.²⁰

The road to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962

Early academic studies on race and immigration in post-war Britain, such as E. J. B. Rose’s Colour and Citizenship published in the late 1960s, argue that the government was unwilling to impose restrictions upon Commonwealth citizens. The Notting Hill riots that occurred in September 1958, when over 300 white youth (many of them referred to as ‘Teddy Boys’) attacked West Indians and their property in the London borough,²¹ were portrayed as a turning point in ‘race relations’ which required intervention by the government. Yet a closer historical look at the political reaction to Commonwealth immigration would suggest that, with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, the British government already had concerns about the influx of non-white Commonwealth subjects.²² For example, in June 1948, Labour MP William Griffith was raising questions about West Indian immigration and its association with unemployment and welfare abuse, asking Minister of Labour Ness Edwards:

Is my right hon. Friend aware that there are a considerable number of unemployed coloured men in the City of Manchester; and in view of the difficulty they are facing in securing employment, will he do everything possible to dissuade these irresponsible people who are sending shiploads of West Indians to this country without there being any jobs here waiting for them?²³

Yet immigration from the former colonies of the Commonwealth was considered a favourable option by some within government and British industry since it would reduce the labour deficit. This was primarily because there were no restrictions on these immigrants’ right to enter, settle and work in Britain, whereas European immigrants incurred costs (paid for by the government and employers) in relation to reception, employment, accommodation and welfare through their recruitment in government schemes.²⁴ ‘Individual British subjects who [came to Britain] on their own initiative’ were deemed not to need any assistance, such as the provision of welfare or housing facilities; and ‘beyond directing them to the local employment exchanges, nothing further needed to be done’.²⁵ For the British government, two competing interests were juxtaposed by immigration from the Commonwealth: the interest of regenerating the British economy through migrant labour and the interest of maintaining some form of homogeneous British culture.

It is clear that the government wished for a sanitised importation of ‘bodies’ to be injected into those industries deemed to be most in need. This was seen as a favourable compromise in seeking to meet Britain’s economic needs, including the maintenance of the Commonwealth system. Neverthel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Decolonisation and the Creation of the British Immigration Control System
• 2. The Border as a Filter: Maintaining the Divide in the Post-Imperial Era
• 3. Reorienting the South Asian Female Body: The Practice of Virginity Testing and the Treatment of Migrant Women
• 4. Deny, Normalise and Obfuscate: The Government Response to the Virginity Testing Practice and Other Physical Abuses
• 5. The Postcolonial World Stage: Immigration and Britain’s International Reputation
• 6. Discrimination by Other Means: Further Restrictions on Migrant Women and Children Under the Conservatives
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index