Britain Invited Them, Then Spent 70 Years Trying to Erase Them On June 22, 1948, the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury, England carrying over 1,000 passengers, including 492 Caribbean citizens stepping onto British soil as invited guests. They were not refugees. They were not desperate migrants. They were British subjects, many of them World War II RAF veterans, arriving in response to explicit recruitment by the British Government, which was desperately in need of workers to rebuild post-w