The 'Bogus Child' and the 'Big Uncle': The Impossible South Asian Family in Post-Imperial Britain.

This article examines how British immigration policy between 1962 and 1968 racialized South Asian families by restricting the migration of male dependent youth from the Commonwealth, particularly Pakistan, under the guise of controlling "bogus children" who were suspected of evading labor voucher restrictions. The Home Office's skepticism toward South Asian familial ties, shaped by colonial assumptions and difficulties in verifying documentation, led to the narrowing of legal definitions of dependence and family reunification, culminating in the 1965 White Paper and the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act that prioritized the cisheterosexual nuclear family. Public discourse and media amplified these state narratives through figures like the "bogus child" and the "big uncle," reinforcing perceptions of South Asian migrants as illegitimate and threatening to British social and economic order. The article highlights how immigration law functioned as a site of racialization, producing new categories of exclusion and shaping the post-imperial racial formation in Britain.