Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World

C. Cox, H. Marland, C. Cox, H. Marland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137303233
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

The volume focuses on the relationship between migration, health and illness in a global context from c.1820 to the present day. It takes a wide range of finely-grained case studies to examine epidemic disease and its containment, chronic illness and mental breakdown and the health management of migrant populations in the modern world.

1

Insanity and Immigration Restriction

Alison Bashford

In the wave of transnational scholarship on the modern regulation of global human movement, the famous immigration restriction acts in Anglophone settler colonies hold centre stage. ‘Drawing the global colour line’, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently put it, was a core element of the great modern aspiration to produce nations out of human difference.¹ The colour line began with various Chinese exclusion acts first in California and the Australian colony of Victoria, followed by acts to regulate Indian indentured labour, to restrict Japanese entry, and to exclude, more generically, so-called ‘coloured aliens’ from any number of jurisdictions. This included all the Australian colonies, British Columbia, New Zealand, Natal, Newfoundland, Cape Colony and later the Union of South Africa. In the United States, the process of Asian exclusions joined a different but compounding system in the early twentieth century that limited southern and eastern European entry through a national quota system.²

Historians of public health have traced the connections between quarantine and immigration restriction, explaining the infectious disease rationales for exclusions and deportations.³ It has been suggested that quarantine measures long predated modern immigration law, the legislative and bureaucratic prelude to broader regulation of movement. But in the modern period, and especially by the early twentieth century, disease prevention and the racial constitution of nations had come to be perceived as mutually constitutive in some contexts. Australia, as I argued in Imperial Hygiene, was aspirationally ‘white’ through both health and racial policy, that is, through linked quarantine and immigration restriction laws.⁴ Analysis of the politics of race and ethnicity has formed the core of most scholarship at the intersection of immigration and quarantine history.

This chapter looks again at the overlap between immigration restriction and health, not through infectious disease management but through ubiquitous mental health and disability clauses in the immigration statutes that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That such statutes almost always included some kind of mental health criteria of exclusion is under-recognised, both in the historiography of psychiatry and mental health and in the historiography of immigration regulation more broadly. The significant exception is Ian Dowbiggin’s work on Canada and the United States, and indeed the combined history of immigration restriction and mental disability has been more strongly mapped in Canada than anywhere else.⁵ And yet, by the early twentieth century almost all alien and immigration laws included a clause restricting or discouraging the entry of ‘idiots or the insane’, the most common descriptors used. What was the pattern of this phenomenon between the various Anglophone jurisdictions, and over time? How do we think about the insanity clauses, as separate to or as part of the powers to deport or exclude on the basis of race and ethnicity? And how, precisely, was all this part of the history of eugenics? Insanity and immigration restriction, it turns out, was foundational to the modern ‘globalization of borders’.⁶ This was a phenomenon that materialised earlier, and was more enduring, than exclusions on the basis of race and ethnicity; it was a transnational process shaped by racial exclusions but cannot be reduced to that.

‘Idiots and the insane’

For many years, those working on the legal history of immigration, and even more so those outside the field, expected immigration acts and aliens acts to have been driven by exclusions. Amy Fairchild’s work on the selective inclusion of Europeans into the US labour force through the screening process at Ellis Island, New York, began to complicate this picture. This has been followed up by Paul Kramer, who shows that Chinese ‘exclusions’ in the United States are rather better understood as a process by which some Chinese (merchants) were screened in, while others (labourers) were screened out.⁷ The same expectation that immigration and aliens acts facilitated entry as much as dictated those who were to be turned back played out in the Antipodean colonies, notably in New Zealand. There, the first aliens act was not about exclusion, but inclusion. And the law that did stipulate criteria of exclusion was not directed against Chinese workers at all, but against the mentally ill. The Aliens Act (1866, amended in 1870), the separate Immigration Act (1868) and the Imbecile Passengers Act (1873) were passed in the wake of the Maori wars.⁸ Pakeha – the foreign, mainly British population – at that point numbered about 250,000. Under huge new government assistance programmes, a robust agent-general in London and immigration agents located through England, Scotland and Ireland, British and Irish emigration to New Zealand was actively promoted. Three-fifths of those who emigrated were English, one-fifth Scottish and one-fifth Irish. Persuasion to emigrate was not always an easy task, with prospective English, Scottish and Irish migrants wary of stories of the Maori wars. But the benefits of overcoming that fear were significant for individuals and families; once in New Zealand migrants could purchase land confiscated from Maori in those very wars. Travel costs were waived, and agricultural labourers and single female domestic servants were sought, provided they were sober, industrious, of good moral character and in good health. They also needed to be ‘in sound mind’.⁹

The intention of the Aliens Act was to facilitate entry and to make more Pakeha out of the offspring of ‘a mother being a natural-born subject of the United Kingdom’ and even out of ‘friendly aliens’ who sought naturalisation.¹⁰ It determined that ‘alien friends’ were to be treated with respect to property and inheritance rights ‘as if he were a natural-born subject of Her Majesty’.¹¹ And the Immigration Act sought to encourage immigration ‘from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland or elsewhere with the exception of the Australian Colonies’.¹² These early New Zealand immigration laws were all about bringing people in, not keeping people out, with the sole explicit exclusion initially being people from the Australian colonies, since New Zealand did not want to build its Pakeha population from convicts or ex-convicts. But with the great success of the process, exclusionary statutes soon followed. Contrary again to the expectations set up by the scholarly focus on race or ethnicity, this did not take the form of a Chinese exclusion act. Rather, the Imbecile Passengers Act was passed in 1873, the first New Zealand law specifically to nominate and define prohibited immigrants. It ordered that any owner of a ship landing with persons ‘lunatic, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind or infirm and likely to become a public charge’ was to provide a bond of 100 pounds per such passenger within seven days of arrival or be charged a further penalty fine.¹³ Neither convicts nor lunatics were to populate the new colony.

The specific nomination of insanity emerged, then, as quite separate to the Chinese restriction regulations that are so often taken as foundational to the history of immigration laws. This was a pattern in the early wave of immigration laws that governed movement within the British world. The Canadian Immigration Act of 1869, for example, was designed to prohibit criminals and the destitute entering from Europe, enacted just after Canadian Confederation, and deriving from quarantine regulations. It forced all vessels transporting sick or deceased passengers to report at Grosse Île, Québec. There were few other restrictions on those who could come to Canada initially, but anyone who was blind, deaf, insane or infirm was now to be recorded by the ship’s captain on passenger lists.¹⁴ In the United States, an 1891 amending act was passed that regulated the entry of all passengers other than Chinese people (whose movement was governed by different statutes), prohibiting ‘[a]ll idiots, insane persons; paupers or persons likely to become a public charge’.¹⁵ This particular list of conditions was to prove resilient and, in one version or another, was to become standard.

In many jurisdictions the differing functions of immigration regulation were increasingly gathered together under one law. That is, separate labour, health and racial exclusionary acts tended to become one statute with successive clauses detailing just who was a prohibited immigrant and how this prohibition was to be implemented. This kind of catch-all immigration act was especially common in the British imperial context because of Whitehall’s marked distaste for the explicit nomination of ethnicity, nationality or race. Indians, Japanese, Chinese or ‘coloured aliens’ were, by the Colonial Office’s strong preference, not to be explicitly prohibited in law. The whole purpose of the 1897 Colonial Conference convened under Joseph Chamberlain was the diplomatic writing out of ‘race’ from colonial immigration law, while retaining the exclusion of coloured aliens intact in practice. The solution was contained in the so-called Natal Formula. This stipulated use of dictation tests of various kinds to exclude people without actually nominating their ethnicity: entrants were asked by customs, immigration or quarantine officials to write out a passage dictated to them, sometimes read in English, sometimes in other European languages, as a device to deliberately exclude.¹⁶ The Natal Immigration Act of 1897 became the model for a great cluster of colonial immigration acts at the turn of the century. It also included as a prohibited immigrant any person likely to become a public charge or any idiot or insane person.¹⁷ A suite of British Empire and Dominion Acts followed, each reading similarly,¹⁸ and covering the colonies of Western Australia (1897) and Tasmania (1898), New Zealand (1899), the Commonwealth of Australia (1901), Canada (1902 and 1910), Hong Kong (1904), Newfoundland (1906), Fiji (1909) and the Union of South Africa (1913).¹⁹ Each included insanity clauses as part of the new trend for immigration acts to manage entry under one statute; in effect, though not in name, the regulation of ethnicity.

There were some exceptions to this conflation of Chinese exclusion acts with broader immigration restriction measures, however. Canada, for example, broke dominion ranks and passed a separate Chinese Immigration Act in 1903.²⁰ It stipulated a range of exceptions for Chinese entry – students, visitors, merchants, accompanying servants might all be allowed to enter. It also stipulated the criteria of exclusion that would trump these exceptions: any person of Chinese origin who was a pauper, ‘idiot or insane’, had a ‘loathsome disease’, or who was a prostitute or who lived from the prostitution of others.²¹ The Newfoundland Act Respecting the Immigration of Chinese Persons (1906) was similar, stipulating beyond ethnicity itself the exclusion of any person of Chinese origin who was ‘an idiot or insane’.²² By the same token, other statutes at the turn of the century focused on the insane specifically, without regard to race. For example, the Hong Kong Imbecile Persons Introduction Ordinance (1904) took its cue directly from the earliest New Zealand law; it was neither about race, nor about infectious disease, but specifically about insanity.²³ Likewise, the UK Aliens Act (1905) excluded a person ‘if he is a lunatic or an idiot’.²⁴

After the First World War, there was another cluster of laws and amendments. These were driven by the major changes in US policy; the shift from incorporating millions of European migrants from the 1890s to the controls put in place with the 1917 Act and the well-known 1924 Immigration Act. By that time, the whole question of race-based exclusions was questioned not just by Whitehall and Westminster but also far more genuinely as a matter of international law, at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. There, a racial equality clause was put on the table by the Japanese delegation and was ultimately defeated.²⁵ The question of racial equality was argued largely over the Australian Immigration Restriction Act, even though a dozen or more jurisdictions had similar policies and laws (most, in fact, more explicitly racially exclusive than the Australian statute).²⁶ In part, because of the international delicacy of this challenge, many jurisdictions intensified their regulations, not least the prohibitions on mentally ill entrants. The United States ramped up its criteria of exclusion in the years after the Paris Peace Conference, as did Canada and Australia. New laws were passed beyond the settler colonial world as well – the Straits Settlements, for example (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World
• 1. Insanity and Immigration Restriction
• 2. Itineraries and Experiences of Insanity: Irish Migration and the Management of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire
• 3. Migration and Mental Illness in the British West Indies 1838–1900: The Cases of Trinidad and British Guiana
• 4. The Colonial Travels and Travails of Smallpox Vaccine, c.1820–1840
• 5. Victim or Vector? Tubercular Irish Nurses in England, 1930–1960
• 6. Immigration, Ethnicity and ‘Public’ Health Policy in Postcolonial Britain
• 7. Immigration and Body Politic: Vaccination Policy and Practices during Mass Immigration to Israel (1948–1956)
• 8. From the Cycle of Deprivation to Troubled Families: Ethnicity and the Underclass Concept
• Index