Immigrating to the “Land of Law”
Safia Bolton / Oct 4 / Immigration
Rab Butler was the creator of the 1962 Immigration Act. He prided himself on the “great merit” that it could be presented as non-discriminatory, even though in practice “its restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost exclusively.”[1] Butler, a white man with British parents, was born in the Punjab province, the same province where my Punjabi grandparents grew up. I have thought about this fact every day since I discovered it six months ago. I have thought about how Butler, the son of a white man who was part of the elite civil service of the British Imperial Empire, would grow up in Punjab, believing himself to be superior to those native lawless ‘savages’ that England ruled over. I have thought about how Butler would move to England, study at Cambridge University, and then become a politician, the politician who could finally fix the problem of the borders, allowing people of different colours to enter his precious, pure England.
It’s infuriating to think of the striking dichotomy between Rab Butler and my grandparents. On one side there’s a man entitled to everything, sitting in his Home Office meetings, working out how to be as racist as he could without appearing so, and feeling so smug when he worked out a way the government could discriminate against black and brown people. On the other side, there are my grandparents, working to provide for their children six and a half days a week against a backdrop of unrelenting systemic racism.
My grandparents arrived in England with their young daughters, and were turned away from viewing houses in neighbourhoods that didn’t want brown immigrants, and yelled at with vicious slurs in the streets. My grandad, who had a degree in mathematics, was rejected over and over from office jobs he was fully qualified to do, and my grandmother, an intelligent woman with an English degree, worked endless hours in a crisps factory to pay the bills because my grandad worried that if he accepted factory work he would never be taken seriously when applying for office positions.
Before my grandparents travelled to England, they first had to survive the 1947 Partition when they were only teenagers, embarking upon an unexpected and devastating journey. They moved from their homes in Lahore because they were no longer safe where they had grown up. Their birthplaces in Punjab, like Rab Butler’s, were previously in India but are now in Pakistan. Partition is a difficult topic because of how many people share the blame for the complete and total devastation and violence that results from it. But there are two facts of which I am certain: the line that separates India and Pakistan was drawn by a white British man who had never visited India or written about India in a professional context, and Partition was heavily motivated by the financial interests of the British Empire - their divide and rule tactic to create chaos between different peoples in India was already decades old.
My grandmother was twelve when her family fled their home and moved to Shimla. She was luckier than most, because she left before the worst of the violence. My grandfather’s family split up into pairs and travelled separately - my great-grandad travelled with his younger brother, and planned to meet in safer grounds on the other side of the new line. While my great-grandad and his brother were on board their train to flee, they realised that a group on the train were killing Sikhs so they jumped off. It took them six weeks to arrive at the arranged meeting location with their family. I don’t think anybody knows how they managed to arrive safely. We think they travelled on foot at night, avoiding villages and towns. It took them so long to arrive that their family assumed they had been killed. My 86-year-old great-uncle recently spoke about this to my mum with tears in his eyes, reliving the fear that he had felt as a young boy that he would never see his dad again.
Having fled from their birthplace, my grandparents both settled in Ambala, where they later got married. When they moved to England in 1965, there were already a lot of Indian immigrants living there - after the Second World War many Indian people were specifically recruited to work in England to meet the demands caused by labour shortages. People from Commonwealth countries were, in many cases, encouraged to move to England. My grandparents moved in order to access the strong education system for their children, believing they would be welcomed to the country.
My mum was part of the generation of ethnic minority children in England who were ‘bussed out’ of their local school areas in order to keep local schools at least 70% white. She says she and her parents had no idea of what was happening at the time, and the ‘bussing out’ was disguised as a way to ‘help’ minorities’ integration into white British culture. My mum was lucky enough not to be segregated from the other students in her class, but in other areas, ethnic minority students were ‘bussed out’ and then put in separate classrooms from white students, causing lasting damage and cementing a divide between white British and immigrant. Later in my mum’s school career when the British Empire in India was taught as ‘wonderful’ she disputed this and she was told that she had a chip on her shoulder. My mum has spoken about being spat at in the street, told to go home, and worse, chased on a dark night in London, just making it to her car on time.
My own experiences have been milder, and I know they are nothing compared to what others, including people in my own family, have gone through. As a mixed race British woman with Indian heritage, I’ve been called ‘Paki,’ (or, many variations, ‘dirty Paki,’ ‘smelly Paki,’ the creative list goes on!), and ‘half-caste,’ ‘mongrel,’ and with an awkward smile on my face, I’ve accepted a number of bizarre compliments such as, ‘for an Indian, you are very pretty.’ In the weeks after the Brexit vote, while walking to dinner one evening in Nottingham, a very angry man threw a bottle at me, my parents, and my younger sister and screamed, amongst an array of vicious, disgusting slurs, that it was time for us to go back to where we were from.
I grew up in a town where I was safe and comfortable, but I’ve never felt any Indian representation in anything we read at school, and the empire was never mentioned. I never even knew about the 2.5 million Indian soldiers who fought in World War Two, for example. I feel very, very afraid that there are people in England who know nothing of what Empirical colonial history truly means. These people may never learn of the devastation the British Empire caused not only to India, but also to the other colonised countries. Our government will not change our education system to include information about colonial history because it is not in their interest. Perhaps they still hold that empirical sense of superiority, and, as our own Prime Minister has demonstrated, perhaps the government genuinely holds the delusional belief that the empire is something of which we should be proud.
Rab Butler’s Immigration Act ended the previous free Commonwealth movement into England by introducing a voucher system which divided immigrants into categories: those who had a job offer, those with skills needed for work in Britain, and ‘unskilled’ workers who did not already have a job offer. Decisions about who was given a voucher, and about which category people were in, were made by the government.
It is highly alarming that the current government is designing a ‘brand new’ Immigration Act which is awfully similar to Rab Butler’s one; it will again allow government members to make choices about which type of individual they would prefer to have in the country. I feel concerned that the notion that immigrants cause all of England’s problems, and the deeply ingrained racism which is tied to this idea, is far from fading away, and it is being further cemented into policy. My mum, who is my inspiration, was an active campaigner in her university days and still has a heart full of passion when discussing racism, but she is also tired. She sees people fighting against all of the same issues she fought against at my age. We both wonder if we will ever see the fundamental changes that everyone deserves.
[1] Memorandum from Home Secretary to Cabinet, 6 November 1961.