Aliens and Immigrants: The Inequities of Deportation before 1962

Until the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the British government's formal powers of deportation were generally limited to aliens.Footnote 8 This limited scope of deportation powers in the metropole contrasted sharply with the sweeping powers that colonial authorities enjoyed.Footnote 9 In southern Rhodesia, for example, the government could deport anyone convicted of supplying alcohol to “colored” persons or anyone unable to read and write in a European language.Footnote 10 Colonial governments also massively expanded their use of deportations in postwar independence conflicts, most notably the Malayan Emergency. One rationale for these contrasting deportation policies in Britain and its colonies was that dangerous individuals were perceived as more threatening in territories with largely uneducated populations than in “highly developed” countries. On this view, Britain could absorb or tolerate both foreign and native-born criminals and dissidents more readily than its colonial counterparts.Footnote 11

Prior to the Second World War, the Home Office had generally resisted deportation provisions for colonial subjects, maintaining that “to deport or exclude any members belonging to the family would only weaken the bonds of Empire.”Footnote 12 But with the advent of nationalist independence movements in Asia and Africa after 1945—which illustrated all too vividly that the “family bonds” of empire might be loosened without Britain's approval—the Home Office began to investigate an expanded deportation policy for the metropole. In particular, the Home Office was increasingly dissatisfied with the judicial methods employed in lieu of a deportation provision for Commonwealth immigrants. Even before 1962, it was possible to expel Commonwealth immigrants by other means. One judge bound over three Maltese men on the condition that they return to Malta and stay out of Britain for ten years; another recorder in Brighton sentenced a Nigerian to twelve months in prison for being an incorrigible rogue and ordered him to return to Nigeria for five years afterward or face a longer prison term.Footnote 13 English courts frequently suspended sentences for Irish citizens on the condition that they return to Ireland.Footnote 14 This method was especially popular in dealing with young Irishmen; rather than sending Irish citizens to borstal in England and placing the burden of reform upon the English taxpayer, the courts were prone to send the defendants back to Ireland instead.Footnote 15

These practices of “binding over” were frequently deplored by the Home Office, because they effectively allowed judges to blackmail offenders out of the country. Furthermore, the procedures for enforcing these orders were far from clear; if a man were escorted to the boat and he refused at the last minute to leave, then the police did not have the power to arrest him. For these reasons, neither the executive nor the judiciary was satisfied with the use of binding-over orders as a means of expelling criminals from the Commonwealth. From the Home Office's perspective, these orders were both ad hoc and unethical, a poor stand-in for a clear executive policy on who could be deported and under what conditions. From the judiciary's point of view, the binding-over orders were impermanent and inadequate (if widely used) substitutes for formal deportation.

When the question of deporting Commonwealth immigrants was raised in Parliament in the late 1950s, the overwhelming public expectation—documented widely in the press—was that West Indians would be the largest group of deportees. The apparent impetus for this proposed legislation was not war with an external enemy but, rather, the 1958 riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham. These eruptions of racial violence, in which crowds of up to 4,000 whites attacked West Indian and African residents with knives, razors, bottles, and iron bars, prompted an outpouring of public anxiety about the “degenerate” working-class white youths who were perceived to have instigated the riots.Footnote 16 British criminologists sought to understand the ways in which postwar affluence seemed to have produced a generation of disaffected, racist, and violent thugs.Footnote 17

Just after the 1958 riots, Home Secretary Rab Butler instituted a new penal regime intended to reorient Britain's youth toward more orderly behavior.Footnote 18 These laws were prompted by the perception that working-class adolescent white males committed their own distinctive crimes: namely, hooliganism and street violence. But this initial scholarly and governmental interest in the violent crimes of white rioters was quickly supplanted by an intensification of attention to crimes committed by Commonwealth citizens: in particular, those acts that were believed to enrage working-class whites. In trying to explain the outbreak of white violence, many British academics and politicians argued that working-class white racism was fueled by the misbehavior of Commonwealth immigrants in the first place.Footnote 19 Such explanations distinguished little between criminal acts (such as living on immoral earnings) and behavior that was widely perceived as socially destructive (such as interracial sex). The key point was the cumulative effect of all of these behaviors on the white psyche.

As Michael Rowe has argued, these connections between black misbehavior and white rioting served to “naturalize” racial antipathy and to place culpability for both the violence and the failures of assimilation upon the black targets.Footnote 20 Although black crime had only the most tenuous link to the riots, it became a compelling framework for understanding the social tensions that had taken hold in postwar Britain. The judiciary demand for deportation provisions to be used specifically against West Indians intensified further after the riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill. Several justices (along with, of course, numerous fascist groups) stated publicly that they thought deportations of black residents might be an appropriate response to the riots, and one lamented that he lacked the power to execute deportation orders for “undesirable” or “misplaced” West Indians who were connected with the riots.Footnote 21

After 1958, statistics on immigrant crime were deployed to establish a genealogy for precisely how white youths had been “pushed” to the point of riot by the misdeeds of their black neighbors. The Home Office suggested in 1961 that although Commonwealth immigrants were not disproportionately involved in criminal activity as a whole, they were especially prone to commit certain kinds of particularly noxious “vice” offenses: perjury, stowing away, possessing illegal weapons, hemp trafficking, brothel keeping, and living off of immoral earnings.Footnote 22 More recently, historian James Hampshire has concluded that Caribbean and West African citizens were indeed overrepresented in vice crimes, although he adds that their involvement was exaggerated by the contemporary press.Footnote 23 As Hampshire acknowledges, however, there were—and are—major problems with assessing the statistics on crime, race, and migration in postwar Britain. As many contemporary observers noted, there were no firm numerical data regarding the total population of color in Britain; it was therefore impossible to determine what percentage of this population might be committing criminal acts.Footnote 24

Furthermore, the length of residence in Britain that rendered an individual liable to deportation was constantly debated. There was no long-term consensus on what constituted an “immigrant” for the purposes of expulsion. Although the police often collected information on the birthplace of criminal offenders, these statistics did not show how long the individual had lived in Britain. In other words, crimes of the foreign born were not necessarily “immigrant” crimes. Police records on this issue were also notably uneven. For example, the deputy chief constable of Birmingham lamented to the Home Office that his records before 1961 only counted convictions for Jamaicans; thereafter, he had also included convictions for other “coloured immigrants” and separated them by nationality.Footnote 25 In the immediate aftermath of the 1958 riots, statistics on crime divided by race or nationality were difficult to obtain. Finally, as Hampshire notes, the only data available relate solely to conviction rates and are derived from a source (i.e., the police) that perpetuated racial stereotypes.Footnote 26 The widespread allegations of vice crime among Commonwealth, and specifically West Indian, immigrants are therefore difficult to confirm or refute. What is clear is that in the wake of the 1958 riots, the limited statistics on “immigrant” crime were deployed in order to support both entry and exit controls and to link the deportation process to the criminal justice system. In this sense, the deportation policies of the 1950s and 1960s might be seen simply as a legislative byproduct of the racial disturbances in Notting Hill and Nottingham: an effort to extirpate those individuals who were increasingly held accountable for provoking violent resentment among white populations.Footnote 27

The riots of 1958 were certainly instrumental in the crafting of deportation provisions for Commonwealth immigrants. Yet, if deportation was conceived by some parties as a tool for resolving racial tensions after the riots, then it was clearly not always implemented in this fashion. The vast majority of deportees were not, in fact, migrants of color who had been convicted of vice crimes. How did a policy that initially seemed to be aimed at West Indians end up targeting the Irish? And how might we make sense of this apparent gap between the conception and the execution of deportation policy? If we look closely at the evolution of debates about deportation in Britain after the Second World War, then we can see that the notion of deportation as a weapon to be used against West Indian “vice” was never universally shared nor was it particularly long lasting. Notting Hill is only one part of the story, albeit a crucial one; 1958 was only one point of departure. There were always major disagreements—most notably, between the executive and the judiciary—about who should be deported from Britain and why.

Metropolitan discussions of a deportation bill for Commonwealth immigrants initially focused on acts of moral turpitude. Even before the riots, a Conservative lobby mobilized for deportation provisions focused specifically on male pimps.Footnote 28 Although deportation provisions would ultimately be folded into legislation on entry controls, they were initially introduced in the venue of criminal law: that is, as an amendment to the Street Offences Act 1959 (or “vice” act). This act, based on the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee, eased the process of cautioning prostitutes and increased the penalties for a wide range of sexual offenses, including rape, sex with a minor, incest, unnatural offenses, solicitation, and brothel keeping. The deportation amendment to the Street Offences Act would have empowered the courts to recommend the expulsion of any individuals from the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland who were convicted of living on the earnings of prostitution.

The amendment was defeated by twenty-two votes to eight, on the grounds that it was undesirable to make such a radical alteration in the legal status of a whole population in respect of one crime alone.Footnote 29 Thereafter, a new deportation bill was drafted, still focused largely on the drug and sexual offenses in which Commonwealth immigrants—but especially West Indians—were presumed to “specialize”: carrying knives, smoking hemp, and pimping white women.Footnote 30 The bill would, however, apply to all Commonwealth immigrants regardless of their race. Several of the listed offenses, such as brothel keeping and living on immoral earnings, were nonindictable, so a tension existed in the draft bill between its stated emphasis on crimes punishable by imprisonment and its underlying interest in vice crimes, which were seen as important spurs to racial violence. On the whole, the proponents of the draft bill tended to view deportation as a useful mechanism for managing and policing a wide range of misbehaviors, although serious crime would be emphasized in later stages of Parliamentary debate.

After drafting the deportation bill, the Cabinet delayed its introduction in order to obtain the views of Commonwealth and colonial governments. The bill prompted angry protests from officials in West Africa, South Asia, and the West Indies, all of which highlighted the misalignment of metropolitan and colonial (or postcolonial) concerns. One key issue of contention was the length of residence in the United Kingdom that might exempt an individual from deportation. M. F. Dei-Anang, Permanent Secretary to Ghana, suggested that the proposed five-year exemption discriminated unfairly against newer residents, who were likely to commit minor crimes because of the racial discrimination and unemployment they faced in Britain.Footnote 31 Officials from Pakistan noted that the bill's purported focus on indictable crime would do little to address other “antisocial” residents in Britain—for example, South Asian students under the influence of communism—who were perhaps even more dangerous than convicted offenders. In communication with the Dominions Office, Pakistan proposed that the bill should include provision for the deportation of Commonwealth citizens whose activities in the United Kingdom were considered undesirable by their own governments: that is, the power to extradite political exiles. This proposal was promptly rejected by metropolitan officials as a confusion of deportation and extradition.Footnote 32 The British deportation bill, the Commonwealth Relations Office assured itself, contained no such violations of individual civil rights.

One noteworthy feature of the draft bill in 1958–59 was that it explicitly conceived of deportation as an alternative to entry controls.Footnote 33 Although staunch anti-immigrationists such as Norman Pannell and Cyril Osborne had led the early push for deportation, the draft bill also won qualified support from liberal organizations, such as the Institute of Race Relations.Footnote 34 Many liberals were willing to support some version of the deportation bill, which was openly hoped to “save us from a worse fate”: that is, the fate of restricted entry.Footnote 35 Officials at the Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office debated using the deportation provisions to expel individuals with forged entry documents but ultimately agreed that this would ally the process of deportation too closely with general immigration controls.Footnote 36 Clearly, it was more offensive to liberal opinion at this stage to keep targeted populations from entering Britain than to expel individuals once they had violated Britain's legal and social norms.Footnote 37 The rationale was that deporting a small group of Commonwealth immigrants (i.e., convicted criminals) would salvage the rights of others, dichotomizing “good” and “bad” immigrants and keeping the right of entry open.Footnote 38

At this stage, then, deportation was conceived of not as a solution to immigration problems or a reversal of the migration process but rather as a palliative for the highly vocal and obstreperous anti-immigration lobby. Furthermore, it was a filter to improve the quality of the migrant population. The liberal presumption, soon to be proved entirely false, was that deportation might serve as a cure for white racism: that as Britain's “colored” population was purged of its criminal elements, racial tensions would ease, and calls for entry controls would fade away.Footnote 39 The Home Office projected that the proposed legislation would result in 500 deportations per year, at an annual cost of £50,000.Footnote 40 By these means, a few hundred rogues would be extracted from Britain each year in order to allow unfettered access to Britain for thousands of others.Footnote 41

In the immediate aftermath of the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots, then, deportation was largely perceived as an alternative strategy of policing that obviated the need for entry controls. Its focus was on expelling individuals who committed vice crimes, which were closely linked to the incitement of racial violence. In the following decade, deportation policy took a new direction. By the 1960s, deportation was increasingly used as a complement to restricted entry rather than as a substitute for it. After the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the trajectory of deportation provisions departed dramatically from this draft bill. Entry and exit, which had been intentionally decoupled in 1958, were by 1962 firmly intertwined. The next section analyzes the ways in which deportation policies changed in the wake of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. In particular, the government's efforts to contend with West Indian criminals through deportation often went seriously awry, underscoring the considerable gulf between real and imagined deportees.

Saving Carmen Bryan: The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962

By 1962, the draft deportation bill had ended its independent existence and had been folded into the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. As one of the anti-vice measures of the Street Offences Act, it had failed; as an element of immigration law, it would expand and flourish. At this point, any opposition between forced exit and unlimited entry disappeared. Instead of “saving” Britain from entry controls, deportation had itself become part of a restrictive entry system.

The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 has been taken as a watershed in the racialization of British citizenship, and scholars have written powerfully of the ways in which this legislation constrained nonwhite immigration. But it is important to note that the act actually consisted of two parts, which operated differently. Historians have focused almost exclusively on Part I of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act: the vexed question of ingress. Part I's entry controls were complex, temporary, and required annual renewal by Parliament. They were effected slowly.Footnote 42 But Part II, the deportation section, was intended as a permanent addition to the statute book. It was also brought into force first. Part II provided for the deportation of Commonwealth citizens who had been resident in the United Kingdom for less than five years, were convicted of offenses punishable by imprisonment, and were recommended for deportation by the court. This aspect of the act has attracted virtually no scholarly attention. If we look closely at the crafting and enforcement of Part II of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, then we can see how uneven and complex the racialization of citizenship was in Britain after 1945.

The mechanics of the deportation process under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act were important, because they required the participation of several different government branches that often held contradictory views on the purpose of deportation. In 1962 courts obtained the power to recommend deportations for Commonwealth citizens who met the criteria outlined in Part II of the act above. But the final decision to deport these recommended offenders rested with the Home Secretary, who ruled on each deportation order served by the courts. The process of deportation, then, required a certain amount of coordination between the Home Office and the judiciary. In the 1960s, consensus between these bodies was frequently lacking.

The first deportation cases under the new act involved an Australian who had stolen a bicycle and an Irishman accused of child neglect.Footnote 43 Neither of these cases attracted much public attention—in the Australian's case, perhaps because he had fourteen previous convictions in his homeland and had arrived in Britain as a stowaway.Footnote 44 With the Carmen Bryan case—the first to involve a Commonwealth immigrant of color—the Home Office was thrown into a human rights scandal. Bryan was a young Jamaican woman, twenty-two years old, who had been living in Britain since 1960. She worked in a welding factory until she was sacked; thereafter, she lived on national assistance. In June of 1962, she stole from a shop in Paddington one packet of tomatoes, four tins of milk, two hand tongs, a clothesline, a Pyrex bowl, and five pairs of nylons: the total value of the goods was just over £2.Footnote 45 She pleaded guilty to a first offense of petty larceny and was conditionally discharged, then recommended for deportation. Although she had not been sentenced to prison time, she was taken straight to Holloway Gaol to wait for Home Secretary Henry Brooke to rule on her case. The imprisonment was unusual, because the Commonwealth Immigrants Act had given courts the authority to release potential deportees on their own recognizance.

Bryan remained in prison for five weeks with no legal advice.Footnote 46 She quickly became a cause célèbre in the British press, which depicted her as a sympathetic victim of the new legislation. Representatives of the Jamaica Migrants Service and Jamaican High Commission visited the Home Office to plead Bryan's case. They also offered Bryan their welfare services so that she could “go straight” and “settle down to a happy and useful life” in Britain.Footnote 47 The fact that Bryan was West Indian was discomfiting even at the Home Office, as deporting a Commonwealth citizen had far more dire—and enduring—consequences than deporting a European domestic or au pair girl: “persons from the West Indies have probably come here to settle, and to require them to return to their country represents a fundamental interference with the plans they had made for their life.”Footnote 48 The expense of deporting Bryan would be upward of £75, which led at least one official to argue against her deportation. R. F. Wood, the Conservative statesman and chairman of the Commonwealth Immigration Division of the Home Office, noted, “it is one thing to deport a Swiss, Dutch, or Italian girl at a cost of £10 or £15 (or for that matter to deport a light-fingered Irishman to Dublin at a cost of £7). It is an entirely different thing to send a Jamaican home.”Footnote 49 Wood proposed instead that Bryan be released on a restriction order, which would require her to report regularly to the police and prove that she was capable of holding a job and becoming a self-supporting member of the British community.

Such statements reveal the often mystifying ways that the official mind categorized deportees (as well as migrants). Interestingly, Wood compares Bryan only to European aliens and not to other Commonwealth immigrants—for example, the Australian—who had already been deported under the new act of 1962. The key factor for Wood, in addition to expense, was the migrant's intention in coming to Britain. By the 1960s, much to the consternation of some, the permanency of the West Indian migration was readily apparent. In this case, the facts of migration shaped the different levels of sympathy for deportees, creating a hierarchy in which the single, female West Indian migrant needed Britain the most. The objections to Bryan's deportation, partly from within the Home Office, illustrate the ways in which antideportation sentiment could itself stem from a paternalist image of West Indian dependence on the mother country. From this perspective, Britain meant more to the West Indian than it did to the Australian, the European, or the Irishman, and the ethics and feasibility of deporting individuals from any of these groups should be evaluated accordingly.

Clearly, Bryan was no one's ideal deportee. Even Norman Pannell denounced the deportation order, for Bryan did not fall into either of his two main target groups of drug traffickers and pimps. Certainly, it was never beneath Pannell to grandstand on a question of race relations. But although Bryan may have been someone Pannell would have sought to keep out of Britain in the first place, she was not the type of person that he wanted to spend political capital on expelling. The ganja-smoking West Indian pimps of Pannell's more inflammatory rhetoric proved to be difficult to locate on the roster of potential deportees. Bryan herself evoked quite a different stereotype of the vulnerable, lone woman migrant.Footnote 50 Furthermore, for Pannell and others, the case also represented an abuse of executive privilege.Footnote 51 Brooke's predecessor, Rab Butler, had explicitly promised that deportation would be used only for grave offenses and after serious consideration of the offender's personal history: a promise that seemed to be contravened in the Bryan case. Across the political spectrum, MPs denounced Brooke's treatment of Bryan and even called for Brooke's resignation.

After widely supported protests organized by Labour MPs Eric Fletcher and George Brown, Brooke canceled the magistrate's deportation order for Bryan. He claimed that Bryan's magistrate had believed she was unhappy in England and that she would benefit from returning to Jamaica.Footnote 52 He unconvincingly suggested that Bryan's personal desires were paramount in his own decision, as he had changed his mind after learning that Bryan actually wished to stay in Britain after all. He referred to a public letter from Bryan, in which she referred to her intention to settle in Britain permanently: “Since I have been out of prison I have felt much better and would be very glad if I could be allowed to stay here in England. … When I was in prison I was so depressed I did not know my own mind and I thought it would be much better to leave the prison and go home rather than stay there. But now that I am out I feel much better.”Footnote 53 Bryan was released on a restriction order, under which she reported daily to the police.

Ultimately, Carmen Bryan's story had a happy ending of sorts, although it was not the ending that either Brooke or Bryan's supporters had anticipated. Upon her release from prison, Bryan married a welder in Britain. The two returned to Jamaica, stating that they would like to raise their family in the sunshine.Footnote 54 Instead of being a forced deportee, then, Carmen Bryan ended up as a voluntarily returned migrant. But what her case revealed about the mechanics of deportation in Britain was more disturbing than her individual fate.

Above all, Bryan's case exposed the extent of division within and between the offices that governed the deportation process about who was supposed to be targeted for expulsion and why. The episode was a disaster for the Home Office, demonstrating that the new deportation provisions had “gone wrong first crack out of the box.”Footnote 55 Even supporters of restricted entry referred to the “lamentable breakdown” of the deportation machinery.Footnote 56 Brooke drew fire for suggesting that it was appropriate to deport in cases where the offense—even if relatively minor—was a symptom of difficulty in settling down in Britain: what several newspapers termed a “benevolent” deportation.Footnote 57 Although the British press was never unified in its attitudes toward deportation, the criticism of Brooke's handling of the Bryan case was widespread. In particular, The Times expressed concern that Brooke was using deportation as a form of social engineering: an instrument of “general surveillance over the social conduct of immigrants, weeding out those who in his judgment were not leading useful lives.”Footnote 58

Was deportation fundamentally a judiciary decision or an executive one? Sir Charles Cunningham, the Lord Chief Justice, argued that deportation was ultimately an “executive act on which courts ought not to have the last word.”Footnote 59 But part of what the Bryan case revealed was the extraordinary power of magistrates over deportation orders. Because deportation was supposed to be reserved for serious crimes, most MPs had expected that the duty would fall mainly on judges (who were assumed to be less racially prejudiced than magistrates).Footnote 60 Indeed, many MPs objected to the provisions that allowed deportation for any offense punishable by imprisonment—for example, including traveling on the London Underground without a ticket—precisely because they placed too much power in the hands of magistrates.Footnote 61 The former Home Secretary, Labour MP James Chuter Ede, reminisced that he had served as a magistrate and knew precisely how bad their decisions could be; he noted ruefully that magistrates were not always in touch with the realities of life.Footnote 62 This concern about the breadth of magistrates’ deportation powers seems to have been well placed. In the very first month of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, out of 125 recommendations for deportation, 109 came from magistrates’ courts.Footnote 63 Brooke refused to offer these courts any guidelines or advice about deportation, and individual magistrates were left to craft policies of their own.Footnote 64 Yet Brooke also frequently reversed magistrates’ decisions. Initially, up to 90 percent of deportation orders were quashed by the Home Office, although by 1963 that rate had dropped to about 50–60 percent.Footnote 65

Deportation recommendations depended greatly on the magistrate's views of how the justice system should integrate—or segregate—those individuals who were subject to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. At the Worcester Quarter Sessions in 1963, the chairman sentenced two Jamaicans for stealing and commented that “other courts would feel you ought to be deported as we have power to do, but this court prefers to deal with accused persons as if they were English offenders.”Footnote 66 The appeals process was haphazard; appeals against deportation orders were refused in cases of theft, but in one case allowed for the indecent assault of a child.Footnote 67 As these cases suggest, postwar Britain did not have a unified policy on deportation. Although the Home Office publicly insisted that it was fashioning deportation policy from above, the Secretary was dependent on the initiative of courts who themselves constantly sought, and failed to find, executive guidance. “Policy” was crafted in each magistrates’ court for each case individually, to be accepted or vetoed by the Home Secretary.

Just after Bryan's deportation order was canceled, a West Indian brick maker, Emmanuel Joseph, was recommended for deportation for stealing £4 10s. from a couple (also West Indian) at his lodgings. The Recorder, Charles Henderson, offered the following as his reason for the controversial deportation order: “Where West Indians live cheek by jowl, two or three to a room … it is essential that they should be honest for the peace of the whole community. I think it is in the best interests of other West Indians who are overcrowded to saturation that those of them who commit offences should go back where they came from.”Footnote 68 The rationale for deportation here was that the British courts should protect the newest arrivals from one another. The court thus sought to articulate a legal distinction between desirable and undesirable residents. This deeply paternalistic argument echoed Pannell's claims that deportation was not in itself antimigrant but was merely a way of policing the boundaries between different types of migrants: the incorrigible criminal versus the legitimate laborer.

Because one of the most widely debated issues regarding deportation policy was the length of time that might exempt an individual from expulsion, deportation provisions were explicitly linked to the broader question of assimilation. As Mae Ngai has noted with regard to deportation cases in the United States, deportation “devalues” or “cancels” the process of assimilation.Footnote 69 In Britain, the question of how much time to give migrants to assimilate before deporting them figured in several criminal cases. Franklyn Rapier, a young man of color from Grenada, was sentenced to nine months in prison and recommended for deportation after he struck a man with a bottle and stole the man's coat during a brawl in 1962. Rapier stated at his trial that in his own country, he would think little of using a bottle to settle a dispute. The trial judge claimed that due to Rapier's limited intelligence, poor understanding of English, and violent behavior, he was not suited to live in England. The Court of Criminal Appeal set aside Rapier's deportation order, noting that deportations were to be linked only to criminal acts, not to intelligence or fluency in English. Although the assault charge had been serious, it did not justify deporting a man who “had not had sufficient time to settle down in England.”Footnote 70 This striking judicial notion that a person might commit a crime such as assault because he had not had time to “settle” in a new country was supported further by the emergent race relations industry. In what Frank Mort has termed the “spatialization” of race, the British race relations experts of the 1950s and early 1960s defined immigrant difference as a problem of environment and setting rather than biology.Footnote 71 The act of setting aside a deportation order on the grounds that the defendant had merely lacked the time to “develop” into a good resident or citizen of Britain (as in the Rapier case) was a way for a justice to express confidence in the processes and powers of assimilation rather than to disrupt them.

What was interesting about such cases was that they did not rely on the presumption that the accused lacked knowledge of the law of the land.Footnote 72 That is, Rapier needed more time in Britain so that he could overcome the temporary disruptions of migration, not so that he could learn the law. Setting aside deportation orders constituted an optimistic statement of faith, whether by the higher courts or by the Home Secretary himself, about the power of the British environment to overcome the cultural differences that might prompt criminal behavior. This optimism was by no means universally shared. In 1963, Norman Pannell sought to strengthen the deportation provisions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act by scrapping the five-year exemption clause, thus rendering all immigrants permanently liable to deportation regardless of the length of their residence in Britain. His bid was unsuccessful, but the length of residence question remained a controversial aspect of deportation policy throughout the 1960s, reflecting some of the divisions in the ways that participants viewed the complex processes of assimilation and acculturation.

As these cases suggest, there were major differences in the ways that the Home Office and the judiciary approached the issue of deportation. The police also played a crucial role by determining who was eligible for deportation in the first place.Footnote 73 Although the deportation provisions of 1962 theoretically applied to all Commonwealth immigrants regardless of race, the likelihood that an accused would be served with deportation orders depended in part on whether the arresting officer thought the accused looked or seemed foreign.Footnote 74 When the arresting officer did invoke the possibility of deportation, the accused then bore the burden of proof to show that he was not eligible for deportation and had to undertake the notoriously difficult process of producing this proof within seven days of being served with deportation orders.Footnote 75 The early days of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 prompted numerous accounts of “rough justice,” in which the police were said to be intimidating immigrants with threats of deportation and bullying magistrates into deportation orders for first offenses and minor crimes.Footnote 76

Numerous legal scholars objected to the crucial role of the police in initiating deportation proceedings. They argued that British principles of justice dictated that prosecution was not concerned with punishment; the initiative for deportation ought therefore to come only from the court without police involvement.Footnote 77 The police generally favored the widest possible deportation powers, proposing that the law should encompass not only convicted criminals but also “young Commonwealth white girl students living with colored men, or young colored girls living with men and possibly pregnant; girl immigrants obviously heading for the ‘streets’; men and women whose mode of livelihood is dubious (living by their wits or engaged in crime); persons who are mentally unsound and are confined in asylums; incorrigible tramps.”Footnote 78 In such proposals, criminal behavior was submerged into a larger field of socially maladaptive actions. Although interracial sex was legal, the police considered it sufficiently undesirable as to render it deportable. Their proposal that a legal act of sexual intercourse or cohabitation should be met with expulsion highlights the ways in which some participants in these debates sought to link interracial sex and crime more generally.Footnote 79 In the wake of the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots, which had forged a public connection between interracial sex, white rage, and racial violence, deportation could serve as a mechanism for policing sexual behavior as well as racial boundaries.

There were other theoretical and practical challenges to confront in the early days of deportation. Was deportation supposed to function as a punishment for the individual criminal or as a social remedy for the nation affected by his or her crimes?Footnote 80 The relationship between punishment and deportation was complicated; the Home Office frequently considered deporting alien or Commonwealth citizens before they had served their prison sentence. Cunningham actually proposed that courts should pass alternative sentences: a shorter sentence in case the offender was deported and another longer one in case he was not. Cedric Thornberry, a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers and a legal scholar at the London School of Economics, argued that deportation constituted a double punishment: that is, prison time plus exile.Footnote 81 Cunningham responded that although it might be attractive to deport Commonwealth citizens immediately, punishment and deportation must be regarded as two separate processes. Deportation, he reminded his critics, was not primarily punitive at all; its aim was not to reform the character of the convict but to preserve the physical and moral safety of the country he left behind.

Deportations without prison time were ultimately rejected on the grounds that they might make Britain seem selfish or parochial, that is, that they represented an abdication of Britain's historic civilizing mission.Footnote 82 How could Britain fail to deter or rehabilitate antisocial offenders before letting them loose to “cause trouble” in their own countries? This problem seemed especially striking when the prisoners in question were citizens of Commonwealth countries, over which Britain had so recently and unevenly surrendered control. Those at the Home Office who opposed deportation often did so on the grounds that Commonwealth immigrants should still be conceived of as part of the imperial “family,” over whom Britain could never fully relinquish responsibility. Sending these individuals back to their newly independent nations as deportees was thus a further admission of British defeat and an unwelcome recognition of other nations’ sovereignty over the processes of moral reform. Such considerations about deportation without rehabilitation betrayed a reluctance to forgo Britain's status as a moral arbiter of justice after the formal end of empire.Footnote 83

If some participants objected to the expansion of deportation because they believed it lessened Britain's global status, then Labour barrister George Mikes offered another perspective: namely, that deportation provisions represented a collective British refusal to accept the realities of decolonization—a pathological effort to extend the legal life of empire. Mikes referred explicitly to the prodeportation lobby as an “imperial hangover,” noting that “we don’t have India any more—but still play the master-race game vis-à-vis some Central European refugees and Italian waiters. We can’t go out and colonise peoples in five Continents—so let's colonise those who happen to come here. … Imperialism without an Empire is slightly ridiculous.”Footnote 84

Ultimately, deportation procedures in the early days of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act reflected a number of competing agendas, from the management of vice and the policing of sexuality to the extension or rejection of the imperial civilizing mission to the elusive—and fictive—dream of demographic control. Looking at the different parties involved in the process of deportation, we can see that the police and magistrates were much more zealous about enforced departure than was the Home Office.Footnote 85 Charles Royle, the Labour MP for West Salford, suggested that magistrates perceived the act as a chance “to get some coloured people sent out of the country.”Footnote 86 That is, Royle accused magistrates of unjustly issuing deportation orders as a substitute for, or extension of, stricter entry controls. But there was a significant gap between those who received court recommendations for deportation and those who were actually deported, particularly in terms of racial composition. The rate of deportation for West Indians and Africans who had been served with deportation orders was about 20 percent, whereas that for citizens of the “White Dominions” was 45 percent.Footnote 87 If the police and courts sought to use the act to “whiten” Britain's population, then the Home Office consistently checked these efforts.

Who, then, were the real targets of the act? Did the Home Office conceive of these targets so differently from the courts? Although the public discussion of West Indian vice served as a powerful anti-immigration platform, it was less effective in producing executive action on West Indian deportations. As the Carmen Bryan case illustrated, the West Indian pimp or drug trafficker never really materialized as a deportee. The debate about West Indian vice continued into the 1960s, but it was increasingly at odds with the underlying facts of expulsion. The gap between real and imagined deportees was increasingly vast.

This article turns now to the group most immediately and profoundly affected by the new deportation provisions of 1962: that is, the Irish. What role did Irish deportees play in a larger discourse of crime and migration? How—and why—did the Irish come to bear the burden of British deportation policies in the 1960s?

Deporting the Irish: The Dilemma of Eternal Return

This section examines the historical trajectory of expulsion for Irish men and women in Britain as a means of exploring further the range of contradictory agendas that shaped postwar deportation policy. More than any other group, the Irish exposed the contradictions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. On 16 November 1961, after much tortured debate, it was determined that the entry regulations of Part I would not apply to the Irish.Footnote 88 The exclusion of Irish citizens from immigration control was one of the most controversial aspects of the 1962 legislation.Footnote 89 It was thereafter impossible to view this part of the bill as anything other than racially restrictive; as The Times said, the bill could no longer be accepted “with any shred of decency.”Footnote 90 The Irish had been included in the deportation debates in 1958 for what the Home Office called “presentational” reasons: namely, to avoid the charge that deportation was racially discriminatory. When the draft bill was abandoned, and new legislation proposed in 1961, there was “anguished consideration” of how to apply entry controls to the Irish, but the question of how to include them in deportation provisions was scarcely mentioned.Footnote 91 Thus emerged the “curious legal fact” that the Irish were exempt from immigration control under Part I of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act but were eligible for deportation under Part II.Footnote 92

Between 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act went into effect, and 1969, the Irish constituted the majority of those deported; in some years, the Irish made up 70 percent of the deportee population and were never less than 60 percent.Footnote 93 Strikingly, there were no protests raised on behalf of Irish deportees; there was no Irish counterpart to Carmen Bryan.Footnote 94 Indeed, there was little public discussion of Irish deportees at all. But the fact that the Irish comprised the dominant group among deportees posed a variety of practical problems. Because there was no border control between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic, Irish deportees could easily return to England without interception. In theory, deportees faced a six-month term of imprisonment if they were caught upon their return, but this punishment was not consistently executed, and the returnees were not always deported a second time.Footnote 95 Irish deportees often brazenly informed their escorting officers that they intended to return to England, sometimes on the very next boat after they arrived in Ireland.Footnote 96 One Irishman, a painter named Joseph Anthony Burke, was deported from England five times between 1964 and 1969, returning to London after each deportation. On his sixth conviction (this time, for possessing 188 amphetamine tablets without permission), Evelyn Russell of the Old Street Magistrates’ Court wearily informed Burke, “We do not want you here,” and recommended him for deportation yet again.Footnote 97 Instead of underscoring English authority over Irish criminals, deportation proceedings provided a new opportunity for the Irish to flout this authority. As the Home Office lamented in 1963, “the system of deporting people who come flocking back can be made to look extremely ridiculous.”Footnote 98 By 1967, the rate of known return for Irish deportees was up to 27 percent.Footnote 99

Some officials suggested that deportations to Ireland cease altogether under these circumstances, but this solution was regarded as politically inexpedient.Footnote 100 Making the Irish exempt from deportation would create a glaring racial inequity, an “unjustifiable immunity.” Of course, Part I of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act already evidenced just such an inequity. The problem of Irish deportees was described at the Home Office as “anomalous and unsatisfactory, but incapable of solution unless we either—(a) treat the Irish better than Commonwealth citizens; or (b) control all traffic across the Irish Sea, including that from Northern Ireland.”Footnote 101 Faced with these choices, the Home Office concluded that it was willing to live with the returning deportees.

Irish deportees also posed problems for penal philosophy. Criminologists were particularly interested in the function of deportation provisions in relation to the theory of deterrence. But the high rate of return for Irish convicts undermined any claim that deportation was a serious deterrent to crime.Footnote 102 Furthermore, the frequent use of deportation to tackle Irish criminal activity in England tended to work against a cohesive rehabilitation policy for Irish convicts more generally; as R. F. Wood commented, there was not much point in rehabilitating someone who was about to be deported.Footnote 103

Postwar criminological scholarship became increasingly concerned with Irish vice. Vigilance associations targeted Irish prostitutes in Britain's port cities, while English welfare agencies repatriated thousands of Irish unmarried mothers in order to reduce immorality on the mainland.Footnote 104 But by the 1960s, sexual misbehavior was not the primary concern regarding Irish migrants. F. H. McClintock, a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, argued that between 1950 and 1960, both Irish and Commonwealth citizens had quickly outpaced their English counterparts in terms of convictions for violent crime. These findings were widely debated and prompted a new round of studies on crime and migration by the Institute of Race Relations. A. E. Bottoms, a scholar of migrant delinquency, argued that McClintock's figures were artificially high because they included domestic disputes as “violent crimes.”Footnote 105 Bottoms claimed that domestic disputes posed no public threat and involved “only technical” amounts of violence. If one discounted domestic violence, Bottoms suggested, then the rates of “violent” crime by Irish citizens plummeted. His own theory was that criminal behavior developed when Irish migrants abandoned their own society—which was full of strong external controls, such as the Catholic Church—for the flexibility and fluidity of English mores.Footnote 106

Interestingly, none of these studies considered discrimination against the Irish migrants as a factor that might affect the crime statistics. What they did underscore—in addition, perhaps, to the limits of criminological interpretations of migrant behavior—were the shortcomings of deportation law with regard to crime control. Although McClintock was willing to attribute West Indian violence to social factors such as poverty or lack of family life in Britain, he did not extend such sympathies to the Irish. His most forceful point was that Irish violence could not be explained by the social pressures of migration. More than half of Irish-born offenders had been in Britain for more than five years, sometimes since childhood, and were therefore exempt from the deportation measures of 1962.Footnote 107 Criminological scholarship thus highlighted the futility of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in reducing Irish crime; if the majority of Irish offenders were long-term residents of England rather than recent migrants, then the deportation provisions of the act could do little to restrain them.

Yet even as the Home Office freely admitted that Irish deportations were ineffective for crime control, it continued to deport the Irish at a high rate relative to other Commonwealth citizens. One motivation might have been to avoid the charge of racial discrimination that was evoked by Part I of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. But if this were the case, then one would expect the Home Office to publicize widely the rates of Irish deportation in order to show that migrants of color were not being targeted or treated unfairly. Most of the detailed information on Irish deportees is available only in Home Office files, many of them confidential and only recently declassified. In the mainstream press, the archetypal deportee remained the West Indian. Relative to the incredibly active media coverage of West Indian crimes, the high rate of deportations to Ireland was a secret of migration history.

For the most part, the Home Office displayed a remarkable lack of interest in the West Indian pimps and drug traffickers who figured so prominently in the British press.Footnote 108 Instead, the Home Office's preoccupation in the 1960s was with a rather different figure: the Irish terrorist. Keeping the public focus on vice crimes, which appeared at first to be so readily governable compared to terrorism, allowed the scope of the threat of political violence on the mainland to be downplayed. The executive thus had a vested interest in keeping the “secret” of Irish deportations.

The “secret” was not just that most deportees were Irish rather than West Indian—and therefore that the exit controls were not working in tandem with the entry controls on migrants of color—but also that there were far more dangerous crimes than pimping or drug trafficking with which to contend. Political violence had to be managed, but also public anxiety or hysteria about it had to be contained. Looking at both the public perception of deportation and its execution reveals the diversity of agendas and anxieties that shaped deportation policies in the 1950s and 1960s.

In order to understand fully the executive focus on Irish deportees (versus the public and judicial focus on West Indians), we need to consider how the English attitude toward the expulsion of Irish criminals developed prior to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. In particular, we need to examine the trajectory and legacy of another law that explicitly concerned Irish deportations: the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act 1939. This act responded to 127 Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist incidents throughout England's major cities in the first half of 1939, fifty-seven of which were in London. The most striking episodes, which aroused public hysteria, were the bombings at the Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road stations in February and at King's Cross station in July. The bombs at King's Cross, which had been left in the cloakroom, killed one man and left fifteen people injured; a bomb at Victoria Station that same week injured five more. At that time, these were the most serious casualties linked to the IRA.

Chamberlain's government promptly introduced emergency powers against persons connected (or suspected of being connected) with the IRA. The government presumed that physically removing the individuals who undertook terrorist activity would prevent further violence. Specifically, the bill empowered the Home Secretary to deport, exclude, and detain any persons who he was satisfied were engaged in the IRA campaign; all Irish citizens on the mainland were also required to register with the police. The original version of the bill included provisions for an elaborate system of port controls and identity cards, but these sections were removed during Cabinet discussions.Footnote 109 Notably, the act placed all responsibility for deportation on the executive, as the judiciary could not be held responsible for the public safety. Any Irish citizen who had resided in England less than twenty years was liable to deportation without a court recommendation. The final version of the bill referred to its deportation powers as a “less tyrannical” alternative to internment without trial, which had long been the preferred solution to political violence within Ireland but was now rejected as abhorrent to public opinion.Footnote 110

The Prevention of Violence Act swept through both Houses of Parliament in two days.Footnote 111 By the end of 1939, 135 expulsion orders had been issued against Irish citizens in England. In order to avoid shows of public sympathy for the accused, these deportations were carried out at night, under close guard, with the deportees placed on a specially curtained and locked carriage of the boat train from Euston Station to Holyhead. But as in the 1960s, Irish deportees in this earlier period had a nasty habit of reappearing where they were not wanted. The deportees were made known to the local police, but no other special machinery was devised to prevent expelled persons from returning to England.Footnote 112 In 1939, James McGuiness was deported from England on a charge of possessing explosives; he then turned up again not only on English soil but actually as a member of the Royal Air Force. When caught, McGuiness asked to stay in England and claimed that “it is surely meet and just that I who once sought to destroy your city now ask that I be allowed to help and make good the damage caused by German bombs.”Footnote 113 More famously, the Republican author Brendan Behan was sentenced to three years’ borstal training for his part in the London and Blackpool bombings in 1939 and was deported after serving part of his sentence.Footnote 114 He broke his expulsion order several years later, was imprisoned, and then deported again for entering the country with a false passport. In the late 1940s, he began a campaign for readmission and was arrested for trying to enter Britain once more in 1952. His expulsion order was revoked two years later, more than a decade after he first sought to contravene it through legal and illegal channels.Footnote 115

We may take these cases as emblematic of both the persistence and the limitations of the Prevention of Violence Act. As The Times noted, many of the deportees of 1939 were guilty of no great offense under Ireland's law and would be “quite free to roam the highways and byways of Ireland at their will. … Ireland's peace may be the sufferer … [and] England's opportunity in getting rid of the Irish malcontents has become Ireland's difficulty.”Footnote 116 As with the deportations of the 1960s, some participants were concerned that expelling criminals from the mainland—even those who directly threatened England's safety—represented an abdication of England's historical role as a moral educator and reformer of Irish men and women. England's peace was at the expense of its neighbors, both before and after the Second World War.

The Prevention of Violence Act was originally due to expire in 1941; it was continued thereafter through the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill. During the Second World War, the migrant flow across the Irish Sea was considered more closely.Footnote 117 New entry controls on Irish migrants were established: for example, all persons over sixteen years of age traveling to the mainland had to possess a valid identity card issued by the Irish authorities. Despite these controls, the wartime influx of Irish laborers was substantial, and several proposals for letting the Prevention of Violence Act lapse during this time were rejected; the government was too anxious about the possibility of IRA activity impeding the war effort to cede the power of deportation. Yet in terms of deportations, the war years were not particularly active. After the initial rush of deportations in the first year of the act, the rate slowed to one or two expulsion orders every few months.Footnote 118 After the war, MPs began to describe the act as an impediment to good Anglo-Irish relations and as a relic of the hysteria prompted by the 1939 bombings. In 1952, the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, was pressed to drop the act completely. He agreed that he would continue it only to maintain expulsion orders already in force, and the power to initiate new deportations was removed. In other words, the act was continued only in order to target the original criminals of 1939 and not any of their successors.Footnote 119

By the 1950s, then, the Prevention of Violence Act was seriously constrained and widely considered to be ineffective. Under its provisions, 190 expulsion orders had been issued; 113 of these orders, or roughly 60 percent of the total, were issued during the first two months of the bill's life. All orders had been issued by 1944. In 1954, the Prevention of Violence Act was dropped altogether from the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill.Footnote 120 The Irish ambassador wrote eloquently of the rehabilitation of the terrorists of 1939, arguing that even many of these criminals had severed their IRA associations.Footnote 121 It was time, he suggested, to declare an end to the “state of emergency” that had developed before the war. On this view, the Prevention of Violence Act was no longer relevant to Anglo-Irish politics. It served only as an unhelpful legislative reminder of more violent and antagonistic days.

Not everyone was satisfied with letting the act lapse, nor did all participants agree that the state of emergency was over. The timing of this move was controversial and divisive at the Home Office. The lapsing of the act followed closely on two major IRA raids in Northern Ireland. In June 1954, a group of suspected IRA men (some wearing British uniforms) raided the Royal Irish Fusiliers depot at Gough Barracks, Armagh, and took weapons from the armory in order to smuggle them across the border. Unofficial reports suggested that the arsenal was extensive: 250 rifles, 27 Sten guns, 9 Bren guns, and 420 dual-purpose rifles.Footnote 122 As The Times reported, “it has come as a shock that the Irish Republican Army, which everyone assumed was more or less moribund, could carry out a raid of such daring.”Footnote 123 The raid led to the restoration of special security regulations for the police in Northern Ireland under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Acts: namely, expanded rights to enter premises, to stop and search vehicles, and to stop and interrogate suspected persons.Footnote 124 Several months later, a more violent raid took place at the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers depot in Omagh. No arms were taken, but five soldiers were seriously wounded; eight men were charged with attempted murder and received prison sentences of ten to twelve years.Footnote 125

At the Home Office, there was much debate about whether the Armagh and Omagh raids warranted extending the life of the Prevention of Violence Act and whether this particular moment of political violence constituted an appropriate time for the government to cede its powers of deportation over Irish citizens. Perhaps because the attacks were localized in Northern Irish barracks, the arguments for continued emergency powers throughout Britain (rather than just in Northern Ireland) failed. Between 1954, when the Prevention of Violence Act was allowed to lapse, and 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act went into effect, the Home Office thus had no power whatsoever to deport citizens of the Irish Republic.Footnote 126 For anyone concerned about a resurgence of IRA activity on the mainland, this was a dangerous position in which to be.

Particularly interesting in the Home Office's discussion of Irish deportation before the Second World War is the recognition of the competing demands of public opinion and public safety. In 1939, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare mulled over the intractable problem of how to target one group for expulsion without the appearance of prejudice. If, he noted, the government's power of deportation were confined to the Irish, this might be seen as an “undesirable discrimination.” Furthermore, a deportation provision aimed specifically at the Irish might cause a public panic about IRA terrorism. His solution: “to meet this objection, the power to remove might be made applicable to all British subjects not born in or established in Great Britain for more than x years.”Footnote 127 As early as 1939, then, Hoare was suggesting that a blanket power of deportation for all British subjects (of any race or ethnicity) who committed crimes would be an ideal mechanism for expelling Irish citizens without either revealing the scope of the threat of terrorism or seeming to target the Irish unfairly.

Part II of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which coincided neatly with a revival of IRA activity in England, fulfilled Hoare's vision for deporting Irish suspects without arousing panic or accusations of discrimination. Although there is no direct evidence that the Home Office deliberately intended for Part II of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to serve as an extension or revival of the deportation measures in the Prevention of Violence Act, it is worth pointing out the bind caused by the Home Office's inability to deport Irish citizens between 1954 and 1962. During this period, the Home Office continued to debate whether it should have allowed the Prevention of Violence Act to lapse in the wake of the Armagh and Omagh raids and whether the problem of Irish deportations might be resolved by new laws.Footnote 128

Through the Prevention of Violence Act, deportation had been established as a significant element of Anglo-Irish relations. In one sense, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was even more useful than the 1939 Prevention of Violence Act had been in that the former tied the function of removal to the judiciary process and thus avoided the charge of abusing executive power that had plagued the Home Office in 1939. It was just such complaints about excessive executive power that had contributed to the constraints placed on the Prevention of Violence Act in 1952.Footnote 129 Indeed, the fact that the deportations of the 1960s were explicitly motivated by the proven criminal actions of the deportee was what made the practice allowable under Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948), which forbade arbitrary exile.Footnote 130 Deportations for criminal activity might be considered harsh, but it was difficult to prove that they were arbitrary.Footnote 131

Most Irish deportees in the 1960s were convicted of crimes against property, especially larceny. This preponderance of robberies among Irish migrants could, of course, be explained by poverty or by the prevalence of young, single male laborers—the group most likely to commit larceny—within the Irish population in England.Footnote 132 But “larceny” also had a longer and more politicized history within Anglo-Irish relations, which again can be traced back to 1939. In stressing the necessity of the Prevention of Violence Act, Hoare had noted that most arrests of IRA members had previously been made by police straining their powers of search under the Explosives Act 1883. Convictions were secured by linking the accused to a few grains of chlorate of potash or perhaps to a balloon such as those used in IRA explosions. But Hoare lamented that by the 1930s the IRA had improved their methods, having their clothes cleaned frequently to remove any trace of explosives and barring any incriminating materials from their persons or in their lodgings. As these individuals had learned to evade legal searches for conspiracy, a new mechanism of search was needed. This mechanism, Hoare concluded, was to be found in the search procedures for larceny. As Hoare noted, the Larceny Act allowed exceptional powers of search that might be usefully applied to IRA suspects: in particular, it allowed a chief officer of police to authorize a constable to search a premises without a justice's warrant. Any accusation of larceny was thus potentially fruitful in the scores of cases in which the police suspected IRA activity but lacked sufficient evidence to proceed under the Explosives Act. To this extent, “larceny” could function as a code word for illegal search.Footnote 133

Certainly, this is not to suggest that all Irish citizens in the 1960s who were deported from Britain for larceny were actually terrorists, or even suspected terrorists. But it does illustrate that the Home Office had a tradition of borrowing the charge of larceny when they wished to get Irish citizens out of England and lacked the evidence to convict them of more serious charges. It may also explain why the Home Office was so willing to deport Irish citizens who were convicted of larceny while it at the same time generally limited deportations for migrants of color to more serious offenses, especially after the Carmen Bryan debacle.

This discussion suggests that the Commonwealth Immigrants Act can be fully understood only when read in the context of Anglo-Irish history as well as racial prejudice about “colored” immigration. According to the British press and, to some extent, the judiciary, the deportation provisions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act were intended to resolve the racial tensions engendered by the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots and to address the perceived threat posed by migrants of color, specifically, West Indian drug and sex traffickers. But at the Home Office, the higher priority may well have been to find a legislative substitute for the Prevention of Violence Act and to extend the long-standing practice of governing multiple forms of Irish crime in England through deportation.

Although the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was overtly directed toward ordinary crime, it may be a mistake with regard to Ireland to dichotomize the governance of “ordinary” crime and political violence. Legal scholars have pointed to the ways in which antiterrorist measures in the late twentieth century were redeployed in order to police ordinary crime for Irish citizens.Footnote 134 In the case of Irish deportations in the 1960s, the policing of ordinary crime may also have been used to address more serious threats. At a moment when the IRA was perceived as quiet, but not inactive, the deportation provisions of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act were highly tactical. In this sense, the deportations of the 1960s appear continuous with those of the 1920s and 1930s: an extension of, rather than a break with, Anglo-Irish tensions over the high stakes of population movements.

In practice, then, if not in explicit intention, the deportations of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act picked up where the Prevention of Violence Act left off, effectively providing a mechanism for deporting Irish citizens without seeming to discriminate against them. Part II of the act reflected not only short-term anxiety about West Indian crime (which came to surprisingly little in terms of actual deportations of actual West Indians) but also the older legislative traces or sediment of anxiety about Irish terrorism. In the two parts of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, a highly public campaign to constrict migrants of color meshed uneasily with a longer history of executive concern—and silence and secrecy—about Irish political violence.

Conclusion: Race and Racism in Deportations after 1945

Recognizing that deportation policy in Britain primarily affected the Irish, rather than populations of color, is significant for understanding the ways in which race did (and did not) figure in the new constraints on British citizenship. Because scholars have focused so closely on entry controls, from which the Irish were largely exempt, the question of racial prejudice has dominated discussions of twentieth-century migration. If we reduce the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to its first part, then the Irish certainly look like the victors of migration history. But if we widen the lens to look at the process of exit, then the issue of race becomes considerably more complicated. Deportation policy evolved out of competing interests and agendas of which racism was only one part, but a crucially functional one. My intention here is not to downplay the role of racism in Britain's laws of migration but to illuminate the widely varying uses to which racism could be put and to highlight the specific ways in which racism may have functioned in the politics of exit. For the Home Office, judicial and public concerns about West Indian crime were extraordinarily useful, providing a legal impetus and mechanism for deporting the Irish while appearing to do something else entirely.

Rather than saying that the Irish were targeted for deportation instead of West Indians, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that both groups were targeted at different moments by different actors. Overall, West Indians represented the “public” face of deportation, whereas the history of Irish deportation was submerged. To some extent, the fantasy of West Indian deportation provided cover for the reality of Irish expulsions, which received virtually no scholarly or public attention. During the postwar era, the Home Office contended with individual magistrates and judges who neither shared nor understood (nor were even necessarily aware of) its agenda. But the structure of deportation law after 1962 allowed the Home Office to revamp magistrates’ recommendations for deportation orders, placing the final decision regarding deportation in executive hands. The police and magistrates created the population from which deportees could be drawn, and this population was certainly circumscribed and shaped by judicial concerns about West Indian crime. But the selection of which convicts to expel rested ultimately with the Home Office, and it was precisely at that point—when the Home Office intruded into the process of deportation—that the emphasis shifted from West Indian or other Commonwealth residents to Irish ones.Footnote 135

None of this, however, answers what is perhaps the most basic question in this narrative. Why did the Home Office bother trying to deport people who were known to return so easily? The difficulty of controlling the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic and the sea border between the Republic and Britain had been used as public justification for the absence of entry barriers on the Irish throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 136 Yet the logistical impossibility of patrolling these borders did not stop the government from deporting the Irish, despite frequent concerns that such actions were futile. The practical problem of border policing may have rescued the Irish from entry controls or at least provided an excuse to explain this anomaly. But although the borders were surely as porous with regard to exit as they were to entry, this fact did not save Irish citizens from forced expulsion. Both in the 1930s and in the 1960s, the British state seems to have focused its hard-won deportation powers on a group for whom deportation was uniquely and essentially meaningless. What was the point of this charade, in which hundreds of Irish men and women were marched down to the docks and sent off on boats to Dublin at great public expense, only to sail right back again? Did these deportations serve any purpose at all?

In surveying the history of postwar deportations in Britain, one might ask whether the most universal theme is actually the failure of deportation to resolve any of the problems that its proponents had articulated. British deportation strategies make sense only if one assumes that public safety was not the primary objective. The deportations of the 1960s were entirely ineffective in terms of reducing crime and terrorism, and what is more, they were admitted to be so even by their most ardent proponents. Where they succeeded, in terms of results if not intention, was in destigmatizing deportation itself. In linking deportation explicitly to criminal law, deportation provisions for Commonwealth citizens effectively severed deportation from war and emergency, thus routinizing and normalizing a power previously reserved for crisis. Between 1963 and 1970, the total deportations for all groups—aliens, Commonwealth citizens, the Irish—increased by about 60 percent, although the Irish dominated until the very end of this period.Footnote 137

Several key changes in deportation policy after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act further emphasized executive power over the processes of expulsion. In 1965, the White Paper Immigration from the Commonwealth proposed that the Home Secretary should be empowered to deport any individual deemed to have entered Britain by evading the act; no court recommendation would be required. The rationale for this proposal further intertwined the issues of deportation and demography: “Too often a court, having no responsibility for the effectiveness of immigration control, has in mind only the one would-be immigrant before it and cannot see how letting him remain can do the public interest any harm.”Footnote 138 That is, the courts might be swayed by the claims of individual defendants, whereas the Home Secretary was better able to survey the broader patterns of population inflow and outflow.

This proposal—which The Times characterized as the executive “dispensing with the safeguards of law”—was eventually enshrined in Part II of the Immigration Appeals Act 1969, which conferred the power to deport any Commonwealth or Irish citizen who failed to observe the conditions under which he or she was admitted. No court proceedings were involved, although the person served with a deportation order might appeal to the immigration authorities.Footnote 139 Shortly thereafter, the Home Secretary was empowered to deport any Commonwealth citizen he considered not conducive to the public good without a court recommendation.Footnote 140 At this point, the judiciary was effectively cut out of the deportation process, and deportation had become an executive affair. The history of postwar deportations thus represents a persistent conflict or misalignment of interests between the executive and the judiciary, in which the executive ultimately emerged victorious.

With regard to the Irish, this new phase of deportation law was strikingly tautological. The Irish were included in the Immigration Appeals Act in name but were unaffected by deportations for breach of entry conditions precisely because there were no entry controls against them. It is likely for this reason that the statistics for deportations of Commonwealth citizens rose in the early 1970s, notably outpacing Irish deportees.Footnote 141 If we survey the postwar era as a whole, we can see that the initial emphasis on vice crimes was relatively short lived and, in any case, never universally shared. In the wake of the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots, public and judicial fears about West Indian vice crimes provided the impetus for new deportation provisions. By the 1960s, the Irish had emerged as the primary victims of deportation law, and the types of crime at stake could not be so easily characterized. The arguments marshaled both by proponents and opponents of deportation provisions were always deeply imbued with racialized assumptions about crime and migration. But ultimately it is not possible to delimit the impact of postwar deportation policy to one racial or ethnic group. The cumulative effect of these decades was to integrate deportation into the ordinary workings of criminal law. The key pattern that emerged by the 1970s was the overall rise in deportation for all groups that were subjected to it, a process that accelerated under Thatcher and has continued ever since.Footnote 142

This integration of deportation into normal migration regimes proved increasingly important by the end of the 1960s. Although deportation for ordinary crime was still possible in this period, by far the most common offenses for which individuals were deported from Britain by 1967 were actually offenses against Part I of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, that is, cases of improper or illegal entry.Footnote 143 No mention was made of the drug and sex offenses that had served as the impetus for the deportation debates in the first place. This earlier focus on vice crimes had been entirely superseded by a new rationale of using deportation to reverse the process of entry. By the 1980s, the Home Office had begun to use minor breaches of residency conditions—such as doing casual work—as grounds for deportation, although such offenses would previously have resulted in a small fine.Footnote 144 At this point, forced exit had become an unexceptional and seemingly unobjectionable response to wrongful entry.Footnote 145 Instead of focusing on the crimes of immigrants, the Home Office had begun a broader and still ongoing pattern of criminalizing elements of immigration itself.