The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status? It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status. It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.Īn estimated 50,000 people faced the risk of deportation if they had never formalised their residency status and did not have the required documentation to prove it. They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. Q&A What is the Windrush deportation crisis? “Landing and embarkation cards were kept in alphabetical order, and by month,” she said, adding that it was a very important database because “it would show who else arrived with you it would show the parents and the children that they brought with them”. Giving details of how landing cards are used currently, the document stated: “Information from a landing card may be used by an entry clearance officer in making a decision on a visa application.”Ī now-retired senior Croydon-based Home Office employee told the Guardian she had regularly used landing card information in decision-making work during the 1980s. The Border Force note appears to undermine the Home Office and Downing Street’s rejection of the documents’ significance. Their accounts have been further supported by the emergence of Border Force guidance, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that appears to contradict the government’s justification of a decision to destroy an archive of Windrush-era arrival slips. Staff, in fact, routinely used landing card information as part of their decision-making process, and saw the Windrush landing cards as a useful resource, according to information from two new Home Office whistleblowers. Home Office claims that the destruction of Windrush-era landing cards in 2010 had no impact on the rights of those individuals to stay in the UK have been dramatically undermined by the evidence of two new whistleblowers.
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