Trevor Rene’s battle to stay in Britain

When Boris Johnson edited this magazine, it proposed an amnesty for illegal immigrants — a controversial notion, but an idea he has stuck to. As London Mayor he suggested an ‘earned amnesty’: if bureaucracy had failed over many years to catch up with the 400,000 undocumented migrants in the capital, he reasoned, why not regularise their status so that they could start paying taxes and contributing to the country in other ways? When this magazine reprised the issue last week, the usual objections were recycled: why reward criminality? But the actual cases are more complicated.

Trevor Rene is one such case. He was born in Dominica in 1969 when it was still a British colony, so as a child he had a British passport. He has family in Britain because his grandfather moved here in the early 1950s, as one of the Windrush generation. He lost his UK passport when Dominica gained independence in 1978, but went on to respond to an advert for recruits to the British army. The Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers didn’t mind about his status. He has photos of his passing-out parade on the walls of his Hertfordshire home, along with the oath of allegiance he swore to the Queen on joining the army. On Remembrance Sunday in 2012 he took part in the Cenotaph ceremony.

‘They were advertising all over the Caribbean,’ he says when we meet in his home in Welwyn Garden City. So he travelled over and signed up. ‘I arrived at Gatwick, told them what I was doing here, and they gave me a six-month stamp in my passport.’ He reported to an army careers office in London. ‘I was 38 and they said I was too old to join the regular army, as they were only taking people up to 35.