Indians are among those caught up in the Windrush controversy rocking the British government, Diane Abbott, the Labour Party’s spokesperson on Home Affairs said during a debate in Parliament, as the scandal over the impact of Britain’s “hostile” immigration regime on Britons of Commonwealth-origin refuses to die down.

Those from India, Pakistan, West Africa and other parts of the Commonwealth were also facing the plight staring at many men and women from the Caribbean, who had come to the UK between 1948 and 1973, and who were wrongly being treated as undocumented migrants, she said during a debate called by the Labour party.

“This is an issue that has resonated across the Commonwealth…There is a whole series of Commonwealth migrants, who, unless the Home Secretary does what it takes, will suffer the same humiliation that the Windrush generation did.”

HMT Empire Windrush was a passenger liner that brought hundreds of passengers largely from the Caribbean to Britain in 1948, as Britain sought labour from its (then) current and former colonies to fill acute labour shortages. The liner has given its name to the whole generation of Caribbean citizens who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973, encouraged by this policy drive. Under legislation brought in in 1971, those who arrived in Britain before 1973 were to be exempted from new rules that no longer gave Commonwealth citizens the right to remain in the UK.

Documentation mess

Under a toughening immigration regime brought in in recent years, and bureaucratic mess-ups that resulted in documentation being lost by the government, many of these men and women have begun to be penalised for failing to have the right documentation and were being treated as illegal immigrants.

Some have been unable to work, others have been denied health care, while still others have been unable to return to Britain following trips overseas.

While most of the cases that have come to light apply to Caribbean citizens, there have been warnings that citizens from all over the Commonwealth were likely impacted.

According to the Oxford Migration Observatory, an estimated 57,000 non-UK nationals arrived in Britain before 1971, including 13,000 from India. Many may have had documentation to demonstrate their status and therefore do not face the difficulties.

While the Conservative government has sought to treat the crisis as an isolated issue at the Home Office, with new South Asian-origin Home Minister Sajid Javid pledging a raft of measures to inject transparency into a review process into how the crisis came about, opposition parties have pinned the blame on the wider immigration policy environment.

“The problem with the hostile environment they set up is that it has swept up perfectly legal British citizens,” said Abbott during the debate. “Its treatment of the Windrush generation was not an aberration.”

The debate comes amid more and more revelations about the impact of Britain’s tough immigration regime. Earlier this week, the Evening Standard newspaper, edited by former Chancellor George Osborne, alleged that Prime Minister Theresa May, formerly Home Secretary, had personally vetoed calls for visa rules to be relaxed in order to let in doctors needed by the NHS.

Last week it emerged that hundreds of non-EU doctors, including from India, had been denied visas even after being recruited by NHS trusts. A separate scandal is brewing over the treatment of foreign students.

The Financial Times estimated that up to 7,000 foreign students may have been deported from the UK for wrongly being accused of faking English language tests. Both instances were brought up by Abbott, and other MPs during the debate.

“The government was warned that the negative outcomes for Commonwealth citizens would be a consequence of the hostile environment policy,” concluded Abbott. “At a time when we are trying to build our relationship with the Commonwealth post Brexit, for trade and other reasons, it is extremely damaging what has been revealed about the way the Windrush generation have been treated.”

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