Managing paper trails after Windrush

Abstract

Stories of those who were victims of the Windrush scandal are characterised by tales of long-lost documents and urgent quests to procure paperwork – maternity certificates, payslips, dental records, school reports – that would attest to a lifetime spent in the United Kingdom. The so-called Windrush generation came to need this paperwork because, although unbeknown to most, the 1971 Immigration Act demanded that from 1973, all migrants must document their ‘legal’ presence in the UK. It was, however, only from 2014 – because of changes in legislation – that now retirement-age Commonwealth citizens, most of whom had migrated to the United Kingdom as children, found themselves facing deportation back to countries that many had not visited for decades (for a historical account of the legislation and politics that led to the Windrush scandal, see Olusoga 2019). The 2014 Immigration Act deleted a key clause of the 1999 legislation that had provided long-standing Commonwealth residents with protection from enforced removal (Taylor 2018). Some of those affected by this updated legislation report that they believed themselves to be legitimate citizens of the British state and therefore did not need to prove their right to be resident through such documentation (for case studies, see Gentleman 2019). In this case, as well as in common-sense thought more generally, documents and paperwork are understood to hold the ‘truth’. Uncover it and their holder’s rightful status will be triumphantly revealed. As such, documents are imagined to act as unambiguous mechanisms of inclusion, their absence therefore denoting the exact opposite.

How can we make better use of ethnicity data to improve healthcare services?

“…Events in the recent past, such as the Windrush scandal, demonstrate the malintent and racist consequences of some government data collection activities. 9 More broadly, experience also shows the importance of respecting the "social licence" for collecting and processing data, 10 especially when those data are potentially sensitive. Public trust must be earned rather than taken for granted, and those collecting data must justify their activities by showing that they contribute to the public good, while acknowledging and mitigating the risks.…”

“…Trust in public authorities is low among some ethnic minority groups8 and for good reason. Events in the recent past, such as the Windrush scandal, demonstrate the malintent and racist consequences of some government data collection activities 9. More broadly, experience also shows the importance of respecting the “social licence” for collecting and processing data,10 especially when those data are potentially sensitive.…”

The interdependency of border bureaucracies and mobility intermediaries: a street-level view of migration infrastructuring

“…Regardless of the travel or migration purpose for which an application is lodged, the application must contain a series of pieces of documentation. As Anna Tuckett (2019) has put forward, documents and paperwork hold the 'truth' . Encounters with migration law and bureaucratic processes rather than practices of border crossers produce exclusion or inclusion (Tuckett, 2018), therefore accounting for the illegalization of border crossers.…”

Democratizing, Stretching, Entangling, Transversing: Four Moves for Reshaping Migration Categories

“…Some categories are imposed from the outside, but others may be claimed and created by migrants themselves. They may appear to migrants as strategies of how to route themselves prior to movement; as choices, as a selection, on forms and documentation where they 'declare' their category and claim a right (Tuckett 2019); or as a way of constructing their own life narratives as they look back and constitute their lives for audiencesfamilies, communities, researchers and so on. It is thus a changing practice that is productive of strategies, of declarations of identity and personhood but also of memory and how we look back and look forward to who we are (Bornat, Raghuram, and Henry 2009).…”