Friday, Jul. 06, 1962

The Closed Door

In the waiting room at Jamaica's Kingston airport last week gathered 122 lucky travelers bound for Britain. An attractive colored girl said: "I don't have a job there, but I'll find one. They say the British hate to work as servants or in other lower-class jobs." A thin, middle-aged man in a brown pin-stripe suit, sizes too large for him, anxiously clutched his one-way ticket (cost: $238). When the flight was announced, a child was lifted high to wave goodbye to its mother; a pregnant woman pressed forward for a last glimpse of her husband as he entered the plane. Just before the door shut, a policeman threw on board a straw basket forgotten by an excited traveler.

This scene was repeated at airports and docks from the West Indies to Hong Kong last week as immigrants rushed to get into Britain before July 1, when the new Commonwealth Immigrants Act comes into force. In the past, any citizen of the far-flung Commonwealth could exercise his right of free entry into Britain. As of July 1, he can enter only as a stu dent or visitor, or if he holds in advance a paper from Britain's Ministry of Labor confirming that a definite job awaits him. In the scramble to reach Britain, Indians in New Delhi paid bribes of $600 to get seats on planes; in Pakistan, the forging of hard-to-get passports became a big business; in the West Indian ports stowaways mingled with legitimate travelers on boats due in Britain before the deadline.

Colored Flood. Many Britons are uneasy at this reversal of traditional Commonwealth policy. As a report by the Church of Scotland put it, the law reduces that sense of "belonging with which any man in any Commonwealth land or language could say, 'Civis Britannicus sum.' " Though the act applies to all Commonwealth countries, white and black, everyone acknowledges that it is intended to discriminate against colored immigrants. But there was little protest in Britain last week, even from M.P.s and newspaper editors who had argued against the bill when it was introduced last November in Parliament. The silence may be partly due to the surging flood of colored arrivals in the past two years, climbing from 7,100 in May 1960 to a high of 14,500 for May of this year. Colored immigrants now total 450,000, or 1% of Britain's population.

The immigrants congregate in London and in the industrial Midlands, and get work as unskilled laborers, garbage men, bus conductors and hospital orderlies. They are jammed in ramshackle Harlems like London's Notting Hill and Birmingham's Balsall Heath, and are frequently victimized by their own countrymen who arrived earlier. Pakistan's High Commissioner in Britain complained recently that London taxi drivers were "kidnaping" Pakistani newcomers at the airport and selling them into "slavery" to other established Pakistanis who paid the taxi fares.

Inequitably Correct. Since the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill and later in the port city of Middlesbrough, violence has grown rare, but it has been replaced by a more finicky discrimination. In Smethwick tenants in a housing project staged a rent strike when a Pakistani family was given an apartment; workers in an Oxfordshire factory voted 591-205 against the management's proposal to fill vacant jobs with colored immigrants. British unions are on record as opposing any color bar, but when job shortages occur, the unwritten union rule is "blacks out first." British social workers argue that 90% of the immigrants are hard-working and law-abiding, and that most of the trouble has been caused by the remaining 10%, who run afoul of the law by engaging in prostitution and settling disputes with knives. Under the new act, such criminals can be deported to their homelands. Says a Manchester official: "If we'd had that power for the past few years, there wouldn't be any problem today." Some city officials welcome the act as a "breathing space to sort out our present unemployment and housing problems." In the future, they claim, immigrants can be admitted as and where needed. A Manchester businessman shares the general belief that the solution is pragmatically correct, if inequitable. "It's generally conceded that the Immigrants Act is terribly un-British," he said, "but it's just another example of the changing times which make un-British acts inevitable."

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