Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962
1 July 1962 | |
Status: Repealed |
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The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 (
Background
Before the Act was passed, citizens of
There was widespread opposition to mass migration in Britain from a variety of political groups, including the
The Act
The Act specified that all Commonwealth citizens, including
The Act went into effect on 1 July 1962.[5]
Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born Communist activist, asserted in 1962 that the Act "established a second class citizenship status for West Indians and other Afro-Asian peoples in Britain."[2] In 1961, she predicted that if it passed, the Act "could be the death knell of the Commonwealth."[7] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, an anti-racist activist, argued that the Act served to 'enshrine state racism in law', while Labour politician Barbara Castle labelled it 'a violation of the very idea of the Commonwealth.'[8]
Aftermath
The Act cut 'racialised colony and Commonwealth entrants' from an estimated 136,400 in 1961 to 57,046 in 1963.[9]
The Act was amended by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 and was superseded by another new Act, the Immigration Act 1971.
References
- short titlesomits the comma after the word "Act".
- ^ ISBN 1134684142.
- ISBN 978-0-470-99619-5, retrieved 26 April 2021
- ^ a b "BBC - Family History Research Timeline: Migration". www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 26 April 2021.
- ^ S2CID 154800776.
- ^ Younge, Gary (10 January 2020). "In these bleak times, imagine a world where you can thrive". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
- S2CID 148041675.
- ^ Saima Nasar, 'Commonwealth Communities: Immigration and Racial Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain', in Saul Dubow and Richard Drayton (eds.), Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke, 2020), 111-113
- ^ El-Enany, Nadine (2020). (B)ordering Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 102.
Further reading
- Jones, Claudia. "Butler’s colour-bar bill mocks Commonwealth", Race & Class, 58:1 (2016), 118-121.
- Paul, Kathleen, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 1997)
- Spencer, Ian. British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi Racial Britain (London, 1997).
External links
- Copy of the Act as originally passed archive.org