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Georgie Wemyss considers how the UK’s legislation about immigration is still entangled with its imperial history
When David Lammy MP tells Parliament that the Windrush scandal is inextricably linked to Britain’s role in the enslavement of Africans or tweets that the government’s hostile environment reforms are a “colonial hangover” of legislation that “abused and violated black British citizens”, anonymous Britons bombard him with vile letters and tweets. Sections of the mainstream media and Twitterati may call out the racism of the tweeters, but they do not fill in the gaps that would explain that the Windrush scandal is only one visible outcome of immigration laws that are a continuation of the British Empire.
Through drawing together critical legal studies and post-colonial scholarship, Nadine El-Enany systematically maps out how the law was put to work in both bordering and racially ordering Britain over centuries of colonial expansion. Viewing Britain...