Here's something I've heard all too often, in New Zealand, in the United States, in the U.K. and even on dKos: "Immigration restrictions are just common sense -- restricting immigration has nothing to do with racism."
Most recently, Tory opposition leader Michael Howard was at it, declaiming in his best pompous voice that "It's not racist, as some people claim, to talk about controlling immigration - far from it. It is plain common sense."
Excuse me while I snort incredulously.
The claim that immigration restrictions are not about racism or xenophobia is just that -- a
claim about the state of the world. And like all claims it requires some supporting evidence.
So, let's see what evidence we can find out there in the real world shall we?
Let's make our first port of call, New Zealand, which, frankly, is not quite the utopia that lots of people seem to imagine.
From 1881 to 1951, the New Zealand government discriminated against Chinese New Zealanders and prospective immigrants by: singling them out for poll taxes, excluding them from the Old Age Pension (1898), singling them out for English language tests on entry (1907), and denying them New Zealand citizenship until 1951 (with the result that Chinese New Zealanders whose families had lived in New Zealand from the 1860s onwards were denied the vote). In 1920 an Immigration Restriction Act was passed allowing officials to reject immigrants who did not have British birth or parentage (can you say "Keep New Zealand White?). You can read more about the whole sordid deal here and here .
And don't be imagining that everything became hunky dory after 1951. Another shameful story can be told about racist immigration policies directed at Pacific immigrants. Not to mention that the political cachet of the New Zealand First Party (formed 1993) depended to a large extent on their willingness to exploit anti-Chinese sentiment among voters. The Asia Pacific Migration Research Network have published a report under the aegis of UNESCO that - among other things - explores this issue.
Speaking for myself, at the time New Zealand First were getting started, I was working as a private tutor, mostly with recent immigrants from Taiwan. And I heard how - as New Zealand First escalated its racist attacks on them, always couched in the smooth rhetoric of `immigration control' and `foreign ownership' - it became less safe for my students to take the bus, less safe for them to walk home from school in the afternoon, less safe for them to live their ordinary, everyday lives. To my shame, it was not until very recently that I realised the extent to which the anti-immigrant fervour fanned by New Zealand First was historically grounded in New Zealand's discrimination against Chinese New Zealanders and immigrants.
Now let's head across the Tasman Sea to Australia. Heard of Woomera?
Woomera didn't come from nowhere, it didn't spring, full-fledged, barbed wire, sewn-up lips and all, from some demonic forehead. It's one of the more recent chapters in a long history of racist immigration policies. The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act was - at the time of its passage, explicitly promoted as legislation to `Keep Australia White.' It provided for "a dictation test of fifty words in length. The test was carried out by Australian Customs officers and could be conducted in any European language. If a person failed the test, they were refused entry into Australia or, if they were already here, imprisoned for 6 months, and likely ordered to leave."
It's worth observing that the test could be administered in any European language - in other words if you were fluent in English, but deemed `undesirable' by a Customs officer because your skin was deemed to be the wrong colour, your dictation test might be given in Greek, or Italian or some other language. The Immigration Restriction Act was apparently quite successful in excluding people of colour as Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Atlee Hunt wrote to Prime Minister Edmund Barton in 1902.
"... We continue to eject the monstrous Jap and the wily Chow with persistence. The I.R Act has not exhausted its possibilities yet. I have four matters now with the A-G for opinion. The April returns show that no coloured aliens passed the test, over 40 were rejected, mostly chows who tried to enter Queensland on false papers."
Barton Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 51/1/976
You can read more about the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act
here
Now, you might be thinking that 1901 is ancient history. But history, like empire, casts long shadows. The dictation test wasn't abolished until 1958, the `official' end of the Keep Australia White policy came in 1963. Unofficially - well, I'm still waiting. Many of the policies of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party (founded in 1997, they gained 10% of the Australian vote in the 1998 elections) were explicitly racist and xenophobic. In addition to vilifying Aborigines, Hanson roused fears of Australia being "in danger of being swamped by Asians." (Here's what the B.B.C. had to say about her in 1998. The political power of One Nation has waned since - probably because the Australian Labour Government under Howard has largely adopted the anti-immigrant stance that characterised them, adding to it an infusion of `anti-terrorist' paranoia. Thus Woomera.
In the U.K., immigration restrictions continue to have a great deal to do with racism and xenophobia - despite Michael Howard's assertions to the contrary. Only last month the Guardian reported that the law lords had ruled that governmental immigration controls discriminated racially against Roma, who were 400 times more likely to be refused entry to the U.K. than non-Roma.
Hopping across the Atlantic, the U.S. also has a history of explicitly linking immigration restrictions to race. Digital History has a fairly informative timeline of U.S. immigration restrictions and laws. More recently there's been this little stroke of genius, dished up under the pretext of Homeland Security.
I could go on.
One of the reasons I think that current efforts to restrict immigration have a racist xenophobic subtext is because historically, efforts to restrict immigration have been overtly racist and xenophobic. And as for people like Michael Howard, who claim that immigration restrictions have nothing to do with racism - well, frankly, they remind me a little of those tobacco institute `scientists' who used to tell us all that `there's no evidence for a link between smoking and lung cancer.' At best, mistaken.