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‘Treated like Chinamen’: United States immigration restriction and white British subjects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2019

Anne Rees
Anne Rees*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, 3086, Australia
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1921, the United States introduced national immigration quotas. Although designed to curb the arrival of ‘undesirables’ from south-east Europe, this quota system also applied to Britain and its white Dominions. By 1929, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were each allocated 100 quota places per annum. The British quota was far greater, but still struggled to meet demand. Through a focus on the Australian example, this article investigates how an immigration regime intended to bolster America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity also exposed the limits of Anglospheric kinship by closing the gates to white Britons. Although the quotas had a comparatively minor impact on Britons, their exclusion held great significance in the context of Anglo-American relations, where the rhetoric of transnational white solidarity produced expectations of unqualified welcome in the United States. After 1921, as such welcome disappeared and then failed to rematerialize, the global community of white men’s countries was shaken and remade.

Keywords

AustraliaBritainimmigrationUnited Stateswhiteness
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 239 - 260
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

Thank you to audience and panel members at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Conference, the Australian Historical Association Conference, the University of Melbourne Brown Bag Seminar, and the La Trobe University History Seminar for your comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the peer reviewers and the Journal editors for their helpful feedback.

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