Editorial | Why UK needs CARICOM

Having at first said no to the meeting between Theresa May and Caribbean leaders to discuss the burgeoning humanitarian crisis over Britain's recent treatment of the Windrush generation of West Indian migrants, Downing Street eventually woke up to the fact that there is often an intersect between foreign and domestic policy.

So, bureaucrats were blamed for the initial snub and Mrs May has assured her CARICOM counterparts, including Prime Minister Andrew Holness, that there will be no deportation of Caribbean migrants who arrived in Britain between the 1950s and 1973, many of whom are without documents to certify their immigration status.

"Those who arrived from the Caribbean before 1973 and lived here permanently without significant periods of time away in the last 30 years have the right to remain in the UK, as do the vast majority of long-term residents who arrived later," Mrs May told the regional leaders. "I don't want anybody to be in any doubt about their right to remain here in the United Kingdom."

There are two substantial issues at play here. One of the proximate matter concerns the status of the children and grandchildren of those Jamaicans and other Caribbean people, who were part of the big post-war migration to the UK, beginning with that epic 1948 voyage, originating in Kingston, on the Empire Windrush ship. These immigrants may have been looking for a better life, but they were also going to a country that they were told they belonged to in the course of empire and after 300 years of British colonisation. There is little doubt that, working in transportation, as nurses, in British factories, in construction and in other areas, they made a major contribution to the rebuilding of an economy ravished by the Second World War.

At the turn of the 1970s, Britain changed its immigration laws, closing the door to the free movement into the UK of citizens from its former colonies of the new Commonwealth. Those who were in the country by 1973 had the right to stay. Many, including several who arrived as children and, effectively, knew no other home, never had their status formalised - people like Lloyd Bogle who, in 2015, at age 64, had lived in England for more than half a century.

This has become a problem in recent years, especially since 2012, when Mrs May, as the home secretary and tasked with pushing through the Conservatives' immigration reduction policy, pledged "to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration".

SYSTEM UNDER THE NEW POLICY

Under the new policy, people, when they sought jobs or health services in the public system, dealt with banks or tried to rent homes, had to prove they were legitimate immigrants. Mr Bogle was caught in the net. He came to Jamaica without clear British bona fides, was not let back in, and was denied entry by the British High Commission in Kingston. He was eventually rescued by special pleas. The problem grew progressively, causing Caribbean governments to intervene.

They might not have been heard were it not for Brexit - Britain's planned exit from the European Union, an attempt, ironically, to assert a notion of British exceptionalism, including the sense of the English that they are being overwhelmed by foreigners.

It is part of this irony that many Conservatives now tout the 53-member Commonwealth, with its 1.3 billion people, but to which Britain now exports only nine per cent of its goods and services - compared to 44 per cent to the EU - as a potentially big, post-Brexit economic partner. That notion, some analysts argue, is fanciful. CARICOM may have only five million people, but it represents 14 Commonwealth members and a strategic political bloc, which, in the Brexit environment, Mrs May will want to have onside.

That's a policy inflection that Jamaica and its CARICOM partners, in any post-Brexit trade agreement with the UK, or any other policy matters, including immigration, must exploit.