Closing the Gate

The kaleidoscopic colors of an oriental bazaar swirled through London's normally drab Heathrow Airport. Clutching bundles bulging with everything from jars of curry powder to television sets, turbaned men, sari-clad women and coffee-tinted youngsters stepped off planes from such diverse points as Cairo, Dar-es-Salaam and Athens. Most of their journeys began in Kenya, where they had sold their businesses at panic prices, paid scalpers' ransom rates for airline tickets and grabbed planes to any place that offered hope of a connecting flight to Britain. Thus last week, in a final, frantic stampede, 6,200 of Kenya's Asians descended on London before Britain finally slammed the gate on one of its major sources of colored immigrants. Until then, any of the more than 125,000 Asians in Kenya who opted for British citizenship when the colony became independent in 1963 were free to enter Britain whenever they wished.

Deeply Disturbed. Even though non-whites account for only 2% of Britain's population, Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Laborites bowed to mounting public pressure and rammed emergency legislation through Parliament to shut off the flood of Asians from East Africa. The British have become increasingly concerned about the thousands of Asians entering the country each month (v. only about 500 a month in former years) as a result of Kenya's intensified job and economic discrimination against them. Under the new law, Britain will admit a fixed total of 1,500 Asian household heads a year, plus their dependents. This quota covers not only the Asians still in Kenya but all of the 1,000,000 ex-colonials throughout the Commonwealth who remain Britons by law, if not by color or culture.*

Despite the overwhelming 372-to-62 vote in the House of Commons, many Britons were deeply disturbed by the racist implications of the bill and by the first restrictions on the unchallenged right, tracing back to Magna Carta, of all British citizens to enter the home country at will. As many as 180 M.P.s either abstained or absented themselves during the ballot. Many newspapers bitterly branded the bill as a betrayal; the Sunday Times caricatured a bloated Home Secretary James Callaghan under a sign: "I'm not blacking Britain." Demonstrators marched with petitions to 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. And the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others, joined a futile mini-filibuster during the House of Lords' longest sitting (19 hours, 16 minutes) of the century.

Easing the Sting. During the all-night Commons debate, Callaghan, the government spokesman, tried to remove some of the bill's sting by promising that no British citizen expelled from Kenya would be denied admission to Britain--though he would not actually write the promise into the law. Later the Home Office thoroughly muddled the situation by explaining that, even if there are a few "humanitarian" admissions, the quota system will stand. That left both critics and supporters of the law so hopelessly confused that the London Times declared: "It has been a wretched affair." Whatever the precise meaning of the law, Labor's handling of the episode left no doubt that it had been just that.

* The quota does not, however, cover British passport holders who have a "substantial connection" with Britain, such as a naturalized father. The entry of nonpassport holders from the Commonwealth is already limited to 8,500 a year under a 1962 quota.

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