Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Border Controls 47
Even, it was argued, if restrictions were applied to all citizens of the Commonwealth,
black or white, this would still leave the problem of how to justify
not excluding the Irish, who were considered to be a desirable and
‘assimilable’ supply of much needed labour.
The politicians’ early efforts to stop the arrival of black workers in Britain
concentrated on trying to persuade governments in the Caribbean and the
Indian subcontinent to stop emigration at source (thus arguably contravening
article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). These
efforts had some success in India and Pakistan. They were hampered even
then by a new trade in false documents, and by a decision of the Indian
Supreme Court that it was unconstitutional for the Indian government to
refuse to issue passports to its citizens. They were mostly unsuccessful in the
Caribbean, where both colonial and independent governments refused to
make themselves unpopular by blocking attempts by their citizens, when
jobs were scarce in the Caribbean, to go and look for them where they were
abundant. Official propaganda, including a film showing severe winter
conditions and the supposed difficulty of getting jobs in Britain, did not fool
Jamaicans who knew that the British were recruiting European voluntary
workers. The government resorted to methods such as denying the right to
West Indians to travel cheaply on troop ships returning empty to Britain.
When the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was eventually passed in
1962, it excluded the Irish from its provisions, an exclusion which was
exploited by Labour in its opposition to the whole principle of the act. But it
got round the problem of how not to appear to discriminate between different
categories of Commonwealth citizens by making entry into Britain
conditional on obtaining work vouchers. These did discriminate, between
skilled and unskilled workers, and the expectation was that most of the
former would be white. The act created three categories of job vouchers for
Commonwealth citizens wishing to enter and settle in Britain. Category A
was for people who had a job to come to; category B was for skilled people;
and category C for the rest. People born in the United Kingdom or holding
passports issued by the British government were deemed to ‘belong to’ the
United Kingdom and therefore not restricted by the act. In the Cabinet Rab
Butler, the then home secretary, is recorded in the recently released Cabinet
papers of 6 October 1961 (quoted by Ian Spencer) as introducing the concept
of work vouchers to his colleagues as follows:
The great merit of this scheme is that it can be presented as making no distinction on
grounds of race or colour. ... Although the scheme purports to relate solely to
employment and to be non-discriminatory, the aim is primarily social and its
restrictive effect is intended to, and would in fact, operate on coloured people almost
exclusively.
The scheme was based on proposals put forward by an interdepartmental
working party of civil servants set up by the Conservative government in
1959 to report periodically on the need for controls. The working party