Global Migration and Betrayal of Immigrants: Lessons Learned from Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Abstract

Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners showcases the struggles of Windrush migrants in their new home host country, Britain, exposing a larger issue appearing in the underbelly of global migration where the societal mechanisms exploit cheap labor from poor countries for global capitalist gain while denying basic human dignity, and at the same time racism underpinning patriotic nationalism. Global migration has become a site of political contentions in recent times with many global and local events that brought the blatant racism against migrants to the center stage. The contagious COVID-19 was such a global phenomenon, which took everyone by surprise. However, the scandal involving non-European migrants is what was most striking as it manifested how the contagious disease, in the Western part of the world, became co-mingled with its pre-existing racial prejudice that views non-white bodies as contagious, which in turn prompted the closure of national borders in the Western hemisphere for such individuals. Another example of impropriety involving migration is the Windrush scandal—a localized event in Britain that occurred a year before COVID-19 but was an ongoing issue there in this period. The Windrush scandal is about the betrayal of a generation of Caribbean migrants from the Commonwealth countries, who were born as British subjects, to Britain with a promise of citizenship but instead were mistreated and betrayed, which got wider global scrutiny and publicity after the COVID-19 scandal. The local British racist immigration policies instantaneously gained notoriety and became part of the global dialogue about the complicated relationship between immigration and racism. In such an environment, Caribbean-born Windrush writers like Samuel Selvon, who wrote on this issue much earlier, need to be acknowledged as a visionary who raised his voice against the systemic racism faced by his people as a global issue well ahead of his time. This essay uses his novel, The Lonely Londoners, to investigate the struggles of Windrush migrants serving as examples of migrants in general, who are used as political pawns for negotiations, forcing them to relocate from their home country only to be betrayed later due to the dereliction of duty by the establishment and failure of fellow citizens in honoring the promises made to them.