This article accompanies Rob Waters’ piece ‘Small Boats, Border Incredulity, and the Hostile Environment in Britain, 1967–1978‘ in History Workshop Journal Volume 98 (Fall 2024) (open access).
Politicians with aspiration head to the White Cliffs of Dover for a publicity shot. Tony Blair would visit to signal New Labour’s tough line on immigration control long before Nigel Farage chose it as the set-piece for his own campaigns. Rishi Sunak turned to the White Cliffs when he feared losing control of the immigration debate to UKIP once again. ‘Tough on immigration’ symbolism can be sought elsewhere too. Priti Patel, as a Home Secretary with ambition, opted for photoshoots at immigration raids, her jacket emblazoned with ‘HOME SECRETARY’, where those around her bore the title ‘NATIONAL CRIME AGENCY’.
Such scenes are designed to signal politicians in control of the border, politicians on the ground, listening to ‘the people’, knowing where the problems are, and getting their hands dirty. With the decisive place of border control in our current political environment—most forcefully through the ‘small boats’ issue of recent years—these scenes function not only as statements about the mechanics of any given immigration issue, but as statements about political authority itself. They are symbolically loaded sites concerned with communicating the government’s very ability to govern.
In my article for History Workshop Journal, I provided a history behind images like these and their social and political effects. My article links together two past moments of panic around ‘illegal immigrants’: the concerns about small boats landing on the south coast in the 1960s, and the concerns about deception by would-be migrants attempting to enter the UK through family reunification procedures in the 1970s. I explore these two moments to demonstrate how, in the period since the virtual closure of primary migration from non-white Commonwealth territories after the mid-1960s, British immigration politics became fixated on the question of how these controls were being evaded, and the supposed impotence of the government to prevent this.
The consequence of this fixation on ‘evasion’ was that not only were claims to the right of migration doubted and disputed, but so were the very citizenship status claims for ethnic minority communities within the UK itself. Such claims were questioned by public officials and by members of the public more broadly, in numerous everyday interactions in which migrants and people of colour were asked to provide evidence of their status, and in which the evidence that they provided was cast into doubt.
My interest in this topic was piqued by an anecdote in Hazel Carby’s memoir-cum-family-history Imperial Intimacies. Carby describes an episode in 1978 in which her Jamaican father, who had lived in the UK since his time serving in the RAF during the Second World War, visited the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon to renew his British passport. The immigration officer who interviewed him swept his paperwork off her desk in what Carby describes as a ‘wild gesture of incredulity’, accusing him of having fabricated his evidence—being not a British subject, as he claimed, but an ‘illegal immigrant’ who had ‘sneaked into the country landing at night on the Essex coast with a boatload of other illegals’.
It is a striking image, and one with contemporary echoes. Carby’s book was published at the height of the Windrush Scandal, in which the news emerged that hundreds British citizens, primarily those of Caribbean backgrounds, had been wrongfully deported and denied legal rights under Theresa May’s ‘Hostile Environment’ policy, on the suspicion that they were illegal immigrants. Carby often made the connection, when speaking of her book, between her father’s treatment and that of the Windrush Scandal’s victims.
The imagery mobilised by Carby’s immigration officer, however, spoke also to other developments since the publication of Imperial Intimacies—most directly to the ‘small boats’ issue. Where, I wondered, did that idea of the small boat, evading detection, flouting the immigration rules, come from? What was its story in the history of the border? What connects the histories of hostile environments and of small boats panics?
Concerns about small boats and border control date back to the earliest arrangements of Britain’s modern immigration regime. The 1905 Aliens Act, the immigration legislation that invented the office of the immigration officer and established the immigration control structure that we still have today, allowed for the inspection of any craft carrying more than twenty alien steerage passengers. Its enactment was immediately followed by panics about the ‘undesirable aliens’ who escaped inspection by travelling in boats of nineteen or fewer passengers. Legislation was tightened to remove this provision in 1914, but in the interwar period, as refugees from continental fascism increased in number, concerns about small boats evading control resurfaced.
The boats that Carby’s immigration officer had in mind, however, dated from a later moment of immigration panic. The first restrictions on colonial and Commonwealth migration began in 1962, with the passage of legislation that restricted the right of colonial and Commonwealth citizens to freely travel to and settle in Britain—a right that had been enshrined in the UK’s first citizenship act just fourteen years previous, with the 1948 Nationality Act. These citizens would henceforth be allowed to visit and settle only if they possessed the correct voucher, and vouchers were tightly rationed. By 1965 primary non-white migration—the principal target of the legislation—was all but ended.
The 1962 legislation, however, did not put the ‘coloured immigration’ issue to bed, and concern quickly turned to evasions of the act, and its ‘loopholes’. These concerns were focused in August 1967, when news broke of eight Pakistani men who had been intercepted as they landed in the early hours of the morning from a dinghy at Sandwich Bay in Kent. The story took on considerable traction and led to a flurry of false sightings of further dinghies.
The Sandwich Bay landing was certainly not the only such landing to take place. Police files reveal similar attempts intercepted at other parts of the south coast across much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, after which time such attempts at entry—newly made illegal for Commonwealth citizens (they were not so until 1968)—appear to have shifted to light aircraft trips across the Channel, and ferry crossings using lorries and vans.
Regardless of the method, however, such attempts were unlikely to have been substantial in number. This was a point readily made by the police and the Home Office, but it made little impact in the national media, where any news with an ‘illegal entry’ dimension was afforded maximum attention. As I turned to the newspapers of the period—and particularly their visual imagery, helped by the vast collection of cartoons at the British Cartoon Archive—I found the image of the boat landing becoming ubiquitous, sufficiently routine that it could be called to mind with the fewest of details. The sea, a beach and (always) a turban were all that was needed to locate it.
In my article, I sought to show the effect of this routinization of the idea of illegal entry. It had a political effect. Since 1962, UK governments had sought to present themselves as tough on non-white immigration, taking the difficult decisions necessary to keep the numbers down. The boat landing, however, more often was used to depict a government in disarray, losing control of the country altogether (it is notable how often the boat landing was tied to other issues in the overriding question of the period—the question, as Heath would famously put it, of “Who governs Britain?”). In the face of frequent stories of evasion, moreover, the perception of a government lying to the populace about the continuing scale of non-white immigration also took hold, becoming the cornerstone of the anti-immigration lobbies, who cast themselves as the only ones willing to tell the nation the truth.
But it was not only politicians who were assumed to be lying. The focus on ‘illegals’ had severe consequences for migrants—particularly migrants of colour—hoping to enter the country, usually to join loved ones and reunite families. It had severe consequences, also, more broadly, for people of colour within Britain, who found their credentials open to scrutiny and disbelief. ‘How can any black person be safe from police harassment when some of his brothers are going to be at risk?’, as the Indian Workers Association put it in 1971. ‘Short of branding all black people with the date of their entry no one will be immune from the shadow of the police’.
In 1978, as Hazel Carby’s father unsuccessfully approached the immigration authorities to renew his passport, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants summed up the national picture: hundreds incarcerated as illegal entrants and overstayers awaiting deportation; regular sweeps on restaurants, factories and homes searching for immigration offenders. Deportation orders had seen a three-fold increase since 1974, and the removal of alleged illegal entrants had increased five-fold over the same period.
The scenes in which the border is made tangible—whether the beaches of the south coast or the restaurants and factories raided by the police as the cameras snap—have agency in the making of immigration politics. They serve a political purpose, whether as a demand on the government or as the government’s proof that it takes such demands seriously. But they have social consequences too. They hover in the background of all kinds of social and state encounter.