US and British officials jointly throttled Caribbean emigration to the US after 1925

Evidence

In the post-World War I years, American and British officials worked closely to orchestrate the access of Black British colonials to the English-speaking metropoles: “According to U.S. immigration records, the United Kingdom used up 43.9 per cent of its quota between 1925 and 1929; 22.6 per cent between 1930 and 1934; and a mere 4.4 per cent in the 1936/40 period. This left room, technically, for considerable emigration to the United States from the British colonies in the Caribbean. However, this never occurred or, to be more direct, was never allowed to happen. Through the issuance of visas, and the requirement of substantial bonds, the United States, with the tacit approval of the British metropolitan and colonial authorities, exercised an extremely tight control over the flow of British West Indians. The result was a sharp decline in the numbers of British West Indians entering the United States after 1925. In comparison to the average of thousands a year up to and including 1924, the average for the rest of the 1920s and for the 1930s became hundreds a year. In 1932, for example, a mere 113 British West Indians entered the United States.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier treatment of West Indian involvement in US Black movements (the reader’s core question about the rise of the Black radical tradition) and to Garveyism’s suppression.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant as background to why West Indian radicals like those in the UNIA and CPUSA operated under growing constraint — supports a narrative of the tradition’s decline via migration control.