Those immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom (UK) between 1948 and 1971 from Caribbean countries, have been labelled the “Windrush Generation”.
This is a reference to the ship MV Empire Windrush, which arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on June 22, 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK.
It is unclear how many people belong to the Windrush generation, since many of those who arrived as children travelled on parents’ passports and never applied for travel documents. There are now about 524 000 people resident in the UK who were born in a Commonwealth country and arrived before 1971 – including the Windrush arrivals – according to estimates by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.
Of these, 467 000 or about 88 per cent have legalised their status in Britain and have passports and citizenship. The problem is the 12 per cent who never bothered over the last 50 years to become “legal” for personal reasons, some just lazy or others nefarious, such as ducking income tax payments or just criminals staying under the “radar”. They all had the same opportunity like the other 88 per cent.
After all of these years, the illegal Windrush remnants have only now become a problem for the British because of the influx of so many other “illegal” aliens, not the least of which are the Moslem jihadis and the difficulty of the British civil servants (much like ours) in identifying the illegal Windrush descendants from the others.
When Barbados suffered its own “Windrush” from Guyana (most of whom were Indo-Guyanese), there was not a squeak from our hypocrites (dare I say racists) when our Government chased 5 000 of these “illegals” from our shores, seriously undermining our economy. These same hypocrites are now pillorying the British for not being the “mother” country they are supposed to be. But then, many of us do not seem to understand “illegal”.
We dump garbage all over the place and get away with it. We drive illegally without adequate insurance and we drive at 50 kph in the right-hand passing lane, forcing others to undertake illegally. We take other people’s property and then sell and buy it illegally on the highway with no accountability. Hypocrites all!
– PETER WEBSTER
