A global trend to legislate for immigration restriction began in the middle decades of the 19th century. It was prompted by two large and sudden global movements – of Irish across the Atlantic during and after the famine of 1845, and of Chinese gold-seekers across the Pacific, to the West Coast of the Americas and to Australasia. California in the US and Victoria in Australia were the first jurisdictions to restrict entry on racial grounds. While the ‘white Australia policy’ became infamous, in fact by 1900 race-based immigration restriction was more ordinary than extraordinary. In most Anglophone jurisdictions – the Canadian provinces, all the Australian colonies, New Zealand, Newfoundland, the US – race-based border control became law and policy with little debate or resistance, sometimes none at all.
Not so in the UK. Pogroms in the 1890s had sparked a great emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the UK, mainly en route to the US. It is true and well documented that a freshly visible British anti-Semitism materialised as violently voiced calls for immigration restriction, modelled on US, Australian and New Zealand law. But what was different in Britain was the equally loud objection to closing off borders, indeed to regulating movement at all. In other words, whereas immigration acts were sailing through jurisdictions all over the globe by 1900, in Britain they met fierce, principled and, for a time, successful resistance.
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Image: Jewish refugees from Russia in Liverpool, 1882
Credit: Wikipedia
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Migration: Britain’s hospitable past
11 February 2014
In the midst of current controversies over immigration law and policy, Cambridge University's Professor Alison Bashford discusses why it's important to recall Britain’s unique place in the international history of modern border control, suggesting that Britain’s principled politico-legal past calls for cautious celebration, rather than the more common critique.