Source 4a: Extracts from an article in The Times

250 Asian families cut off from fathers. 

By Christopher Walker 

An estimated 250 Uganda Asian families in Britain are still without their fathers because of the “harsh and arbitrary” rulings of British immigration policy, the Coordinating Committee for the welfare of Evacuees from Uganda said in its report released yesterday. 

The committee said that a Mrs Khinji had been living at a Dover guest house for the past 10 weeks with her three children at an estimated cost of £57 a week to Kent social services department. “Her husband is stateless and at present in Belgium. If he and many like him were let in, their families would cease being a burden to the British taxpayer”, Miss Helene Middleweek, a co-author of the report, said. 

Some wives of Ugandan Asians stranded in India are still being looked after at one of the two remaining resettlement camps, West Malling, in Kent. 

The Committee criticised the Government’s attempt to divide Britain into “red’ and ‘green’ areas for Asians. 

The policy of offering assistance to families wishing to go to ‘green’ areas but not ‘red’ ones meant that many of the refugees who had relatives or friends already here, almost inevitably in ‘red’ areas, by-passed the board completely.” 

The report blames low pay, unemployment of some members of large families, high rents and the administrative practices of the Supplementary Benefits Commission for the poverty of some of the self-settled Asians. 

[…]

While a proportion of Asians now living in the community -especially those who made their own arrangements to do so- are in unsatisfactory accommodation and are experiencing difficulties, the information available from surveys carried out for the board all over the country refutes any suggestion that ‘the vast majority joined the homeless, the unemployed and the socially deprived’. Some 80 percent of those capable of employment are working. There is ample evidence that many have settled satisfactorily and are making a success of their new life. 

[Image caption: A Uganda Asian woman, whose husband is not allowed to settle in Britain, reading a letter from him to other separated wives yesterday at West Malling resettlement camp in Kent.]