Wednesday 22 June 2022 06:02 PM Prince William says he 'learnt so much' on Caribbean tour trends now
Between 1948 to 1970, nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which in 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War.
The immigrants were later referred to as 'the Windrush generation'.
It refers to the ship MV Empire Windrush, which docked in Tilbury on 22 June 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands.
The 492 passengers were temporarily housed near Brixton in London. Over the following decades some 500,000 came to the UK.
Working age adults and many children travelled from the Caribbean to join parents or grandparents in the UK or travelled with their parents without their own passports.
Since these people had a legal right to come to the UK, they neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK, nor following changes in immigration laws in the early 1970s.
Many worked or attended schools in the UK without any official record of their having done so, other than the same records as any UK-born citizen.
In 1973, a new immigration act came into force putting the onus on individuals to prove they have previously been a resident in the UK.
In 2010, the Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK.
It came despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties, it was claimed
Then in 2014, a protection that exempted Commonwealth residents from enforced removal was removed under a new law. Theresa May was Home Secretary at the time.
Under a crackdown on illegals, Windrush immigrants were obliged to provide proof they were resident in the UK before 1973.
In 2018, questions were raised in Parliament about individual cases that had been highlighted in the press.
On March 14, when Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn asked May about an individual who had been refused medical treatment under the NHS during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, Theresa May initially said she was 'unaware of the case', but later agreed to 'look into it'.
Parliament thereafter continued to be involved in what was increasingly being referred to as 'the Windrush scandal'.
On April 16, David Lammy MP challenged then Home Secretary Amber Rudd in the House of Commons to give numbers as to how many had lost their jobs or homes, been denied medical care, or been detained or deported wrongly.
Lammy called on Rudd to apologise for the threats of deportation and called it a 'day of national shame', blaming the problems on the government's 'hostile environment policy'.
Rudd replied that she did not know of any, but would attempt to verify that. In late April, Rudd faced increasing calls for her to resign and for the Government to abandon the 'hostile environment policy'. There were also calls for the Home Office to reduce fees for immigration services.
On May 2, Labour introduced a motion in the House of Commons seeking to force the government to release documents to the Home Affairs Select Committee concerning its handling of cases involving people who came to the UK from Commonwealth countries between 1948 and the 1970s. The motion was defeated by 316 votes to 221.
On April 25, in answer to a question put to her by the Home Affairs Select Committee about deportation targets, Rudd said she was unaware of such targets, saying 'that's not how we operate'.
The following day, Rudd admitted in Parliament that targets had existed, but characterised them as 'local targets for internal
