ABSTRACT

AFTER THE enactment of the CIA 1962, immigration law rather than citizenship law was used to define who ‘belonged’, and consequently what it meant to ‘belong’, to Britain. The CIA 1962 totally ignored the citizenship statuses created by the BNA 1948, rendering the entitlement to citizenship rights and obligations subject to immigration control, not the other way around as in other countries. For example, within the status of CUKC, those from Hong Kong became subject to immigration control, whereas those born in the United Kingdom did not. The neglect of citizenship statuses continued with the next major immigration law passed in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 (CIA 1968). The then Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, in introducing it, made it clear that ‘the general principle that a person should not be deprived of the right to enter the territory of the state of which he was a national, did not apply when he did not belong in any real sense to the territory in question’.1 In the absence of British citizenship up to 1981, immigration laws were enacted for the purpose of confining substantial aspects of citizenship to those who ‘belonged’ to Britain.