Immigration restriction: rethinking period and place from settler colonies to postcolonial nations*

Alison Bashford

Journal of Global History, 2014, vol. 9, issue 1, 26-48

Abstract: Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jglhis:v:9:y:2014:i:01:p:26-48_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Global History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().