Winston Jones was 16 when he crossed the Atlantic to join his mother in London. Born in Jamaica in 1956, he came as part of what’s become known as the Windrush generation: tens of thousands of people from the British colonies in the Caribbean invited to migrate to the UK to help rebuild postwar Britain.

This article appears in VICE Magazine's Borders Issue . The edition is a global exploration of both physical and invisible borders and examines who is affected by these lines and why we've imbued them with so much power.

“My mother brought me here for a better life,” Jones said. “We all thought Britain was the land of dreams.” Jones threw himself into British life as a night trackman for the London Tube, then as a car mechanic. He voted, paid taxes, and did everything else expected of a stamped-and-filed citizen.

It wasn’t just that being a part of the Windrush generation meant to Jones that he might come to the mother country as a former colonial subject and be treated as an equal; the nation was selling a narrative to the rest of its citizens, too. In their minds, the invitation—extended by the 1948 Nationality Act—was the beginning of a new story Britain was telling itself. The horrors of war were over, the empire was decolonizing, and Windrush was a symbol of a Britain starting afresh—the prologue to a new story of an open and progressive nation at peace with itself and the world. It was to be seen as a feel-good chapter in British national history. And it could well have been.

Only, by the time Jones arrived in 1972, that story was already being overwritten with an older one. Four years earlier, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech predicted Britons would soon become “strangers in their own country.” Two years after that, the anti-migrant Conservative Party won a surprise electoral victory. And then the year after Jones arrived, a new Immigration Act to choke the flow of migrants from the New Commonwealth came into force. Over the next three decades, he saw economic inequality widen under Margaret Thatcher’s reign, creating a legacy of division that no successive government could shake. Soon, for many, crippling austerity measures to calm the 2008 financial crisis only rubbed salt into Britain’s wounded soul. “There was a lot of racism,” Jones said. “But we learned to get on with it.”

The nation was angry. And, as usually happens when nations grow angry, a cold front of nationalism swept in. This was the new story the British establishment decided to tell, and people like Jones just didn’t quite fit. Immigrants became targets, and the Windrush generation got caught up in policies by Theresa May’s Home Office designed to make Britain what she called a “hostile environment” to those deemed not to belong. Thousands of law-abiding British citizens who came to the country as part of Windrush became victims of xenophobia and bungled bureaucracy. Jones was among those unlawfully stripped of his citizenship and national identity.