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

Border Controls 53
middle class there. Some of them had opted for British rather than local
citizenship when the East African colonies became independent. The 1962
Act therefore did not apply to them. When in 1967 the Kenyan government
passed legislation restricting Asians with British citizenship to temporary
residence, a campaign started, led by Enoch Powell and Duncan Sandys, to
ensure that they did not exercise their right to come to Britain. Like the fears
aroused by the threat of controls in 1961, this had the effect of speeding up
the exodus; 10,000, mainly skilled and middle-class, Kenyan Asians entered
Britain in February 1968. This was considered to constitute a crisis. In
March 1968 the Labour government rushed a second Commonwealth
Immigrants Act through parliament. The act subjected all holders of United
Kingdom passports to immigration controls unless they, a parent or a
grandparent had been born, adopted or naturalised in the United Kingdom.
The 1968 act left about 200,000 Kenyan Asians with largely valueless
passports and in effect stateless, in spite of the promises made to them at the
time of independence. As a concession the government introduced a voucher
scheme which would allow in 1,500 Kenyan Asians and their families per
year. But it also introduced new restrictions on the family members of Commonwealth
citizens.
The introduction of the act was opposed by the Commonwealth secretary,
George Thomson, who is minuted in the Cabinet papers of 15 February 1968
(quoted in the Newsletter of the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation
Campaigns of October–December 1999) as follows:
Although he recognised the problems that would be created by a continued inflow of
a large number of Asians from Kenya, to pass such legislation would be wrong in
principle, clearly discriminatory on grounds of colour and contrary to everything we
stood for. ... We should effectively deprive large numbers of people of any citizenship
at all or, at best, turn them into second class citizens.
Thomson’s arguments were overruled by the prime minister, James
Callaghan, who concluded in a memo of 21 February 1968 that:
We must bear in mind that the problem is potentially much wider than East Africa.
There are another one and a quarter million people not subject to our immigration
control. ... At some future time we may be faced with an influx from Aden or Malaysia.
The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act threatened to scupper the government’s
new Race Relations Act and the efforts to promote legislation
against racial discrimination by the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins,
who had said in 1966 in a speech to the Institute of Race Relations that he
was ‘glad that we appear to have put behind us the sterile debate about the
precise level of the flow of immigration’ (quoted in Deakin; speech reprinted
in Race, vol. VIII, no. 3, January 1967). Racism had finally become blatant
in the operation of immigration controls.
Far from keeping the racists quiet, the act was followed a month later by
Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Powell was at the time a member of