Caribbean Commonwealth high commissioners have called for the UK government to resolve the issue of elderly Caribbean-born undocumented residents, including Jamaicans at risk of being deported by the Home Office.
Many of the Caribbean-born individuals whose undocumented status has now been called into question, arrived in the UK as children under their parent’s passports at a time when their island was still a British colony.
These now elderly Caribbean-born individuals have no formal identity documentation as they assumed they were automatically British citizens.
Although the British Nationality Act 1948 granted British citizenship to individuals from Commonwealth countries, the introduction of the 1971 Immigration Act restricted free movement of Commonwealth citizens, although it did grant indefinite leave to remain for those who arrived before that year.
According to the Migration Observatory of the University of Oxford, up to 50,000 Commonwealth-born residents who arrived in the UK pre-1971 have not had their residency status made permanent.
Since 2012, the Home Office enforced systematic immigration checks on those intending to open bank accounts, applying for a driving licence, and accessing medical care.
The demand of burden of proof has meant that undocumented Commonwealth-born UK residents, the majority of whom are from the Caribbean, have had to produce documentation that predates 1971 to prove their residency.
Numerous cases pointing to the harsh treatment of undocumented residents by the Home Office have emerged over the past few months.
Paulette Wilson, a grandmother who lived and worked in the UK for 51 years, was detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Centre and threatened with deportation to Jamaica, a country she had not visited since the age of 10, after she was told she was illegal.
Wilson is one of many individuals deemed illegal by the Home Office, resulting in the denial of their right to work, their access to bank accounts and medical care, subsequently being forced to report to detention centres with threats of deportation.
Meanwhile, a 63 year old Jamaican man who has lived in London for 44 years has been told he must pay 54 thousand pounds up front for life-saving therapy on the National Health Service (NHS).
Albert Thompson who has worked in the UK for three decades and paid his taxes has been denied healthcare as the Home Office can find no record on him.
In an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper, Thompson said he lost the passport he arrived in the UK with several years ago.
Without a British passport — which he has never had and cannot now get because there is no documentary proof of his arrival in the UK as a teenager in 1973 — landlords will not house him, and the NHS has told him that it will not give him further treatment.
Free up di tings. Mek di ppl dem can survive.
from my understanding during the late 1990’s up to the early millennium, a lot of people bought uk passport and citizenship due to the broken system at the time, also during that time the uk was transitioning to fix the system, at some point later down the stretch, home office and the uk government became aware and I think these people are now the sacrificial lamb, very unfortunate, like I said many times, while every country reserve the right to their own sovereignty, if you have cases where people reside in a country that long, contribute to the economy and to society, not a convicted criminal, its very inhumane to forcefully repatriate them to countries they know little about or with fragile infrastructure especially in health, and to think these are the very said governments and representatives of these countries criticizing other third world countries about human rights(nikki haley is one such and she should be damn ashamed of herself to even have anything to do with that government, the DR is another country, CARICOM is like the UN, useless as a governor general.