On 13 May 1924, Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini convened the first International Conference on Immigration and Emigration in Rome. Convoked under the auspices of the International Labor Organization – and attended by delegates from fifty-eight countries – this unprecedented gathering represented an attempt to manage the intensifying global trend toward immigration restriction. Most significantly, the conference began just ten days before President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation that tightened already strict national origins quotas in the United States. The impending retrenchment of American immigration limits augured particular cause for concern, given that country's reception of millions of European migrants in the years before the First World War.Footnote 1 The practical closure of American borders to southern and eastern Europeans would invariably dislocate existing circuits of transatlantic migration, staunching the most traversed transatlantic networks while potentially engendering new pathways elsewhere. As a New York Times editorial observed as the meeting got under way in Italy, those European migrants diverted by American restriction would either “cut new channels for [themselves] or pour more heavily through channels outside the United States.” Wherever these spurned migrants turned in lieu of American ports, it was obvious to the Times editorial board – as it was clear to the delegates in Rome – that “the dikes raised in this country against the alien flow are bound to have a world-wide effect.”Footnote 2
Despite the disruptions that American restriction wrought upon established patterns of migration – and despite the fundamentally global significance of American immigration policy – we still know relatively little about the international consequences of the Emergency Quota Act and the National Origins Act, passed by the United States Congress in 1921 and 1924 respectively. The contraction of American borders traumatized networks of transatlantic migration, and these policies therefore raise important but largely overlooked questions about the global reverberations of American quotas during that formative postwar decade.
To be sure, historians have documented the political, economic, and cultural changes impelled by these statutes inside the United States, from the reorientation of domestic debates about race, ethnicity, and identity to the reordering of industrial and welfare capitalism.Footnote 3 More recent scholarship in the fields of both migration and diplomatic history has embraced transnational and international approaches, exploring the wider contexts and implications of American immigration policies. However, this scholarship does not generally interrogate the effects of the national origins system in other countries. Instead, research on Asian American immigration and identity has proven especially fertile for scholars of migration and diplomacy, and these authors have illustrated how the changing dynamics of international politics in the Pacific both reflected and contorted American exclusion and discrimination practices before, during, and after the Second World War.Footnote 4 These recent works join a related literature that explores the broader transnational aspects of Asian mobility around the Pacific.Footnote 5 Donna Gabaccia's cleverly conceived book Foreign Relations is something of an exception, in that it adopts a capacious canvas and highlights some of the innovative interpretive possibilities of bringing the often distinct fields of migration and American foreign relations into conversation.Footnote 6 Nonetheless, even Gabaccia only hints at the broader consequences of 1920s-era restrictions for and inside other nations.
These wide-ranging studies – often temporally embedded in the Cold War and spatially rooted in the transpacific – have done much to uncover the many filaments that connect the politics of migration, bordering, and American foreign relations. This article nevertheless adopts a different approach, focussing instead on the indirect and often unpredictable repercussions of American border control practices abroad during the 1920s. Characterized as it is by functional Asian and southern and eastern European exclusion, this period practically requires that we shift our attention away from the United States, and instead seek out the reverberations of American restriction wherever and however they resounded. Unlike much of the existing literature, this article therefore does not elucidate the active and deliberate activities of individual migrants or diplomats in challenging or preserving American exclusion. Instead, it examines one particular “world-wide effect” of American quotas in order to illuminate their inadvertent and neglected influence beyond the borders of the United States.
Specifically, this article asks a simple but important question: how did the national origins quota system affect other countries? Australia offers a case in point. Although distant and seemingly disconnected from the newly fractured matrix of transatlantic migration, the Australian example nevertheless illustrates the indirect, unintended, and unanticipated global resonances of restrictive American immigration policies. Indeed, the apparent remoteness and isolation of Australia from the experience of transatlantic migration is precisely what makes this example so intriguing, because it illustrates just how expansive, influential, and unexpected the imposition of American quotas actually was. Many Australians observed the constriction of the American border with growing anxiety and trepidation in the early 1920s, fearing that a flood of southern and eastern European migrants would surge toward the Australian Commonwealth in the wake of their rejection from the United States. A loose coalition of legislators, government administrators, labor unions, newspaper editors, and ordinary citizens therefore scrambled to reinforce Australian immigration controls before significant numbers of Italians, Greeks, Albanians, and Maltese could inundate their borders. While some Australian observers demanded an American solution to this allegedly American problem – systematic quota restrictions on southern and eastern European migrants – the Australian government was inhibited by the Commonwealth's relationship with Great Britain, and by the limited capacities of the Australian consular service. Though politically and administratively hamstrung, the Australian government nevertheless instituted a piecemeal system of negotiated limits and quotas that borrowed from, but did not and could not wholly reproduce, American approaches to restriction.
The newly instituted American quota system intentionally – and unintentionally – rewired long-standing networks of migration, goods, and money, and it is therefore important for scholars of both twentieth-century migration and American foreign relations to understand the myriad international implications of those restrictions. The Australian reaction to American immigration restriction demonstrates that the effects and implications of American quota policies during this period were keenly and often obliquely felt abroad, sometimes in ways that American legislators and policymakers could not have imagined. It also provides an example of the kind of work scholars of migration and American foreign relations might undertake in the future. How did the national origins system directly and indirectly influence social, economic, cultural, and political processes not only in the United States, but around the world? To what extent did American curbs on immigration excavate new conduits of migration across both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans? What were the implications of those newly refracted networks? Questions like these open up new possibilities for research in the burgeoning subfield of migration and American foreign relations by allowing us to apprehend the extensive, consequential, and often inadvertent global ramifications of United States immigration and restriction policy.
THE EMERGENCY QUOTA ACT AND GROWING AUSTRALIAN ANTIPATHY, 1921–1922
As American immigration quotas progressively choked transatlantic migration routes between 1921 and 1924, transoceanic steamers brought increasing numbers of Italian, Greek, Yugoslav, and Maltese migrants to Australia. As their numbers slowly burgeoned, so too did Australian apprehensions about southern and eastern European settlement. Before exploring Australian reactions to this perceived influx, it is important to note that anxiety toward non-British immigration had a long history in the Antipodes. The redirection of migrant flows engendered by American quotas in the 1920s therefore exacerbated already entrenched Australian antipathies toward southern and eastern Europeans. The inaugural Commonwealth Parliament instituted an uncompromising statement of white racial citizenship upon Australian federation in 1901. Enshrined in the Immigration Restriction Act, that legislation constituted the centerpiece of the notorious White Australia policy.Footnote 7 But not all white immigration was created equal, and the success of the White Australia policy depended upon vigorous British blood, not the substandard variety that apparently coursed through the veins of eastern and southern Europeans.Footnote 8 Assumptions about the deleterious influence of non-British European immigrants – reinforced by a growing eugenics movement – exacerbated Australians’ already chauvinistic attitudes during, and especially after, the First World War. In July 1919, for example, Australia's Bulletin editorialized on threats to whiteness in England, conflating eastern and central European immigrants with “colored” African and Asian immigrants. “No clean white race wants to see itself become semi-negro or Chow,” the editorialists conjectured, “or partially Polish Jew, or half Mongol-Russian-Bolshevik.”Footnote 9 A disgruntled Australian veteran luridly encapsulated this strain in postwar nativism, writing in 1922 that the Maltese represented “a cross between a Dago and a Gyppo.” From his perspective, “the isle of yells, bells and smells sits well in the Mediterranean. We don't want it transported to the Pacific. It's too tired and dirty.”Footnote 10
At the same time, conceptions of southern and eastern European racial and cultural inferiority blended with new political and economic anxieties in postwar Australia. The social forces unleashed by four years of war continued to resonate, even in the South Pacific. In this unstable postwar context, prospective migrants from Europe's southern and eastern tier represented a potential vector for the spread of that beleaguered continent's many perceived ailments. Political and economic radicalism seemingly thrived in the poverty and devastation of war-torn Europe, and a particularly virulent strain emanated from Bolshevik-controlled Russia. As Prime Minister William Morris Hughes proclaimed during a speech in August 1920, “The world today is in a molten state: Bolshevism is yet a great living force. It is working in many insidious and dangerous ways in every country. Other disintegrating forces are at work here. We have agreed to hold Australia, and we must be prepared to defend it.”Footnote 11 If contemporary observers imagined socialism, anarchism, and communism in epidemiological terms, the very real Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–20 also ravaged the globe, inflicting greater casualties worldwide than the war itself.Footnote 12 Australians could ill afford to relax their preference for British migrants in this dangerous international environment.
These anxieties peaked in the 1920s, and American restriction played a major role in their intensification. President Warren G. Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act on 19 May 1921, which enacted 3 percent quotas on European immigration. Based upon national origins and derived from the 1910 census, this formula had the intended but unstated effect of favoring migrants from northern and western Europe.Footnote 13 As these new restrictions curtailed entry to the United States, many Australians noted a troubling escalation of southern European immigration. On 17 December 1922, for example, the SS Re D'Italia arrived in Western Australia. Before the First World War, that vessel had plied the transatlantic route, carrying migrants between the United States and Italy. Now, it transported over six hundred Italians from Genoa to Freemantle. Interviews with the Italian passengers revealed that most had originally intended to settle in the United States, but faced with new American restrictions they now saw Australia as “the most likely place to make their future.” According to local newspaper reports, most of these prospective immigrants planned to continue on to the larger cities of Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney, and few had jobs waiting for them when they arrived. Unable to secure employment, and denied assistance from the community or the state, at least 150 made the trip back to Italy the following February. Despite the hardships that befell these and other hopeful European immigrants, the SS Re D'Italia continued to convey passengers from Italy to Australia in the coming months, and its manifests diversified to include not only Italians, but also “Greeks, Jugo Slavs and other Southern Europeans.”Footnote 14 It was joined by mail and passenger steamers like the Orvieto, the Ormonde, and the San Rossore, all of which regularly brought migrants from Mediterranean countries.
There were those who perceived opportunity in these new arrivals. For example, some proponents of economic development praised Italians and Greeks as “dark-skinned” whites who could toil in Queensland's verdant but uncultivated lands. Acclimated against the enervating heat and humidity of the Commonwealth's tropical north, southern Europeans could succeed where pale and fragile Anglo-Saxons had allegedly failed.Footnote 15 Others nevertheless condemned this reasoning as a Faustian bargain that threatened the foundations of the White Australia ideal. The Truth, a radical Sydney tabloid, dismissed such plans “to flood Australia with the poorest elements of Europe's submerged helotry.”Footnote 16 Representatives from regional Chambers of Commerce in the Tablelands of Northern Queensland concurred, citing the potential economic, cultural, and strategic threat posed by large concentrations of non-British immigrants. Veteran and labor organizations joined the protests, outraged that non-English-speaking migrants secured employment at the expense of native Australians.Footnote 17 Having recently returned from a research trip to Greece, Sydney University's Professor William John Woodhouse also spoke for the skeptics when he deprecated “the people of the decadent nations of Southern Europe.” His widely reported remarks concluded that the “shifting, parasitic element of population” that tended to emigrate from places like Greece, Spain, and southern Italy had no place in Australia.Footnote 18 Woodhouse predicted that Australians would soon face “the racial difficulties that now confront America” if they allowed these unassimilable communities to grow unchecked.Footnote 19
Prominent American eugenics activist Charles M. Goethe arrived in Sydney in the midst of this mounting agitation. As president of the self-styled Immigration Study Commission, Goethe proselytized against “biological illiteracy” in the United States, decrying the insalubrious racial characteristics of southern Europeans and Mexicans.Footnote 20 American nativists like Goethe had spent years building the case for eastern and southern European restriction, from the Congressionally mandated Dillingham Commission in 1911 – which derided so-called “new immigrants” as poor, diseased, or otherwise defective sojourners drawn to the United States by illicit international labor brokers or the white slave trade – to Madison Grant's 1916 lament for the Passing of the Great Race.Footnote 21 Like many of his contemporaries, Goethe applied the putative lessons of history, eugenics, and demographics to the subject of immigration, and determined that migrants from southern and eastern Europe degenerated the American racial stock. Having contributed to the successful application of these principles in the United States, Goethe now evangelized in Australia. Tenuously claiming Australian ancestry, he initiated a letter-writing campaign to major newspapers in which he acknowledged that American restrictions were responsible for the recent swell of southern European migration to the Commonwealth. “We [Americans] have erected dikes against that flood,” Goethe recognized; “as a result it must flow elsewhere.” Goethe counseled that without immediate action, “Mediterraneans” and “Latins” would flood the Australian continent next, diluting white racial purity and ghettoizing the Commonwealth's cities in the process.Footnote 22 Increasingly pensive Australian reporters noted similar warnings from the American press. New York's Evening Sun, for example, believed that Australians had apparently “abandoned the hope of an entirely Anglo-Saxon Australia.” If they allowed southern European immigration to continue unabated, the Commonwealth would “soon rival the United States as the objective of emigration.”Footnote 23
These smoldering anxieties also infiltrated the Australian government, and the superintendent of immigration, Henry S. Gullett, was among the first to sound the alarm following the United States’ passage of the Emergency Quota Act. Gullett attributed the increasing interest of non-British Europeans in Australia to the significantly reduced accessibility of the United States, and he understood that Australians’ existing aversions toward southern and eastern European migrants would intensify as migration flows diverted from the United States. Gullett was concerned that these new immigrants would exploit government programs to further increase their numbers. In particular, he worried they would take advantage of a new sponsored-passage system designed to reunite immediate relatives of non-British European immigrants already resident in the Commonwealth.Footnote 24 Gullett derided this policy as the functional equivalent of a racial Trojan Horse. Allowing relatives of northern and western European immigrants to join their families in Australia was one thing, he mused, but Poles and Italians were quite another. As he told the director of migration and settlement in London, Percy Hunter, “my own feeling is that we should have as little as possible to do with Central and South-Eastern Europeans.” As he warned Hunter,
it is obvious in this matter that we must consider both Australia's extremely sensitive sentiment on the subject of the foreigner comprehensively referred to as the “Dago,” and also that we must go further and recognise that a great flood of Europeans into the Commonwealth is inevitable in the near future.
According to Gullett, the suspect whiteness of southern and eastern European “Dagos” rendered them undesirable potential immigrants, whose extensive entry into Australia would have “far-reaching effects upon the quality of our future population.”Footnote 25
In January 1922, Gullett reached out to D. B. Edward, the Australian commissioner in New York, in an effort to bolster his case against the government's misguided magnanimity. He sought information regarding the American experience with immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe, and he repeatedly exhorted the Australian commissioner to ascertain American views on the “relative desirability of people of the different European nationalities.”Footnote 26 Edward in turn sought counsel from the United States commissioner general of immigration, William W. Husband. Husband had played a key role in the Dillingham Commission, and his tenure as commissioner coincided with the passage and implementation of immigrant quota restrictions. Edward's final report drew heavily upon Husband's insights, which largely reinforced what keen Australian observers like Gullett already believed. The American provided a detailed history of the myriad inadequacies that distinguished the desirable, productive, and assimilable “old” immigrants of northern and western European extraction from the detrimental, deficient, and unassimilable “new” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. He identified eastern European Jews as particularly unwelcome, concluding that “these people who have been so long without a country, have no love of country.” In addition to relaying Husband's summary of American objections to southern and eastern European immigrants, Edward also dispatched copies of Grant's The Passing of a Great Race and abstracts of the Dillingham Commission's findings.Footnote 27
By the time Edward's memorandum reached Melbourne, Gullett had relinquished his post following disagreements with Hughes over the Commonwealth's assisted-immigration scheme.Footnote 28 Over Gullett's strenuous objections, the prime minister mandated the imposition of Australian quotas once the new family reunion policy went into effect in July 1922. As in the United States, the new quotas were to be derived from the total number of foreign nationals from each country then resident in the Commonwealth. The goal, according to the prime minister's office, was “the desirability of not allowing any one foreign nationality to predominate.”Footnote 29 These allocations nevertheless proved confusing and difficult to enact, and the quota policy languished in bureaucratic limbo once Hughes left office in February 1923.Footnote 30 In the meantime, concerns mounted as ships continued to bring what one Queensland newspaper called “the human sweepings of the smellful cities of Southern Europe.”Footnote 31
THE JOHNSON-REED ACT AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF AUSTRALIAN ANXIETIES, 1924–1925
Petitions and protests against the growing threat of southern and eastern Europeans proliferated in early 1924. At a meeting of the Cairns and Northern District Sub Branch of the Returned Soldiers’ League in January 1924, for example, speakers complained about Greek and Italian laborers and agriculturalists, who threatened to swamp Australia's northern regions. “A large foreign element was congregating in the north,” the Queensland veterans complained, and it was their organization's duty to “put the matter before the country and then the politicians should endeavor to have restrictions placed upon the wholesale importation of foreigners.” Without immediate action, this undesirable foreign element threatened to oust white Britons from Northern Australia.Footnote 32 This was a slow but relentless invasion, according to J. T. Beckett, the Northern Territory's former chief inspector of Aborigines. “What our somnolent immigration officials have to face,” Beckett argued in April 1924, “is whether Australia is to be stocked by the British race or slowly poisoned by the gradual persistent penetration of ill-conditioned southern Europeans who have really as much in common with us as Asiatics.”Footnote 33
These antipathies crescendoed following President Calvin Coolidge's authorization of the Johnson-Reed Act on 24 May 1924. Although highly restrictive new quotas did not become operative until 1929, the new legislation immediately delimited European immigration to the United States by reducing existing quotas to 2 percent of the total foreign population residing in the country according to the census of 1890. Once again, this formula disproportionately discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans, since they did not immigrate to the United States in large numbers until later in the decade.Footnote 34 In addressing complaints from around Australia about escalating southern and eastern European immigration in this statute's wake, The Bulletin identified the source of the problem with characteristic candor in September 1924. The cause of this recent influx of “swarthy representatives of the Alpine and Mediterranean races” was simple: “It is manifestly a consequence of the U.S.A.'s abandonment of the melting-pot tradition.” Once the American quotas were fully operational, the editors warned, Australia would become an alternative dumping ground for the surplus populations of southern and eastern Europe. This would inflict racial deterioration upon Australia's carefully crafted white population and encourage radical alien political ideas such as Marxism. Until Australia's political leadership could muster the will to impose strict limitations on southern and eastern European immigration, The Bulletin concluded, Australian immigration officials should enforce the spirit of the Immigration Restriction Act and test these undesirables in impossibly arcane languages such as Cornish or Gaelic.Footnote 35 As The Bulletin reported again in October 1924 following the recent arrival of Yugoslavian and Bulgarian immigrants in Sydney, “what has proved no good to Uncle Sam is certainly not much use to a British community of Australia's class and type.”Footnote 36
The pace and intensity of these complaints increased as the year wore on. It was not just Australian veterans who railed against the perceived influx of undesirable southern and eastern Europeans. Religious organizations, nativist associations, and small-business owners also joined the campaign. The New South Wales Protestant Federation registered its strong opposition to Greek and Italian immigrants in a petition to the prime minister in June 1924.Footnote 37 The Australian Natives’ Association's South Australian Branch went further, conflating southern Europeans with Asian immigrants, the traditional bugbear of Australian nativism. Its members were perturbed by the seeming increase in “so many foreigners of South European and Asiatic extraction,” and demanded that future immigrants “be of the British race.”Footnote 38 One business owner from Victoria, J. A. Newton, was even more uncompromising. Referring to the recent landing of Italian and Greek immigrants in his state, Newton implored the prime minister to consider whether it was really “in the best interests of this Country to permit these hoardes [sic] of southern European scum to enter.” “If the White Australia Policy is worth anything,” Newton suggested, “then it should be enforced against these undesirable foreigners who are unable to speak the English language and who are no benefit to any Country.” Even the “Chinaman,” he exclaimed, was a more useful colonist than the Greek.Footnote 39 The Western Australian branch of the Australian Natives’ Association was equally agitated by the “grave danger of lowering our National and Race standard, by the unrestricted immigration of people, such as those from the shores of the Mediterranean, who appeared to have reached only a very low standard of civilization.”Footnote 40
Activist civic associations and businessmen were not the only ones demanding federal government intervention. State government officials also expressed their opposition. In July 1924, New South Wales premier George Fuller complained to the Commonwealth government about the Italian influx. According to the government's own statistics, over three thousand Italians arrived in Australia in 1922. This was compounded by the arrival of 472 Greeks, 361 Scandinavians, and 179 Danes. The Italians and Greeks were “of a very poor moral type,” Fuller complained, and he attributed their recent increase to the new American restrictions. Faced with this growing incursion, Fuller demanded that the Commonwealth government impose quotas on all non-British immigrants.Footnote 41 The South Australian Premier reported similarly disturbing increases in the arrival of southern and eastern Europeans in his state. Once again, Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Spaniards, and Maltese were undermining Australia's white Anglo identity. “The presence of these foreigners constitutes a menace to the community,” Premier John Gunn protested, since among other things they supposedly deterred desirable British immigrants from immigrating to Australia.Footnote 42 In Western Australia, Premier Philip Collier reported that hundreds of Italians and Yugoslavs were arriving every month. He remonstrated that these new arrivals put British Australians out of work and were simply “not readily assimilable either from a national or an economic standpoint.”Footnote 43 Like their counterpart in New South Wales, Gunn and Collier demanded immediate federal action to stem this growing tide.
The federal government's response to these incessant state and local protestations was multifaceted. Nationalist Party prime minister Stanley Bruce – elected following Hughes's resignation in 1923 – privately doubted there was even a problem to be solved. The last census had revealed that 99 percent of Australia's population was still British in origin. As Bruce observed in December 1924, the Australians “ideal of peopling the Commonwealth with Anglo-Saxon settlers” was not under any serious threat.Footnote 44 The government also immediately ruled out one remedy proposed by opponents of non-British immigration: expansion of the Immigration Restriction Act's dictation test to southern and eastern European immigrants. As one government memorandum declared in January 1924, “it is not the practice to apply the test to white immigrants, except in very special cases.” Rather, the test was designed “to be an absolute bar to admission” of nonwhite immigrants.Footnote 45
Despite widespread calls from local, state, and federal organizations and governments, the Commonwealth government was also reluctant to institute a large-scale quota system based upon the American model. According to an internal government report on the quota system – conducted shortly after the enactment of the National Origins Act in the United States – that system was unworkable for two reasons. First, Australians remained constitutionally obliged to respect treaty obligations undertaken by the British government. For example, the British government abolished visa requirements for Italians in 1923, meaning that Australians could not expect British help in administering the restriction of Italian migrants. Similar provisions were in place elsewhere in Europe. Second, the actual implementation of a quota system posed an insurmountable practical hurdle:
America has a Consular service all over the world to assist in carrying out the system. She has only one gateway for immigrants from Europe, and it is only a few day's sail to New York from Europe, the hardship of returning rejected immigrants is comparatively small when contrasted with the return voyage of 12,000 miles from Australia.
Moreover, the Commonwealth government would have to rely on the British in the absence of a global Australian consular system. This was deemed both unfair and impracticable given Britain's postwar commitment to reciprocally limiting visa requirements for travel in Europe.Footnote 46 Emulation of the American system of remote control was therefore ruled impossible in the absence of a sophisticated, independent, and extensive overseas network of Australian agents:
It is admitted that Southern Europeans, especially Greeks, are not to be compared with the Nordic type of immigrant, but having Australia's empty spaces in mind, the necessity of safeguarding the White Australia policy, the present small percentage of alien population here, the special difficulties of carrying out a quota system in Australia, it is considered that the time is not yet ripe for the introduction of such a system in the Commonwealth.Footnote 47
Instead, the Commonwealth government implemented a patchwork system of restrictions on southern and eastern European immigration designed to either complement or overcome existing treaty arrangements, foreign obligations, and other practical obstacles. In the case of Italian immigrants, the Bruce ministry negotiated directly with the Italian government to limit the number of Italians arriving in the Commonwealth. The Italian government agreed to withhold passports from their emigrants unless they had friends or relatives in Australia, or enough money to avoid becoming a charge to the Australian state.Footnote 48 A similar arrangement existed with the government of Malta.Footnote 49 In both cases, Bruce was mindful of the British government's interest in mollifying an erstwhile wartime ally on the one hand, and a strategically important crown colony on the other.
The government did impose quotas upon Greeks, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and other “white aliens.” These informal limits were generally set around 1,200 per year, and their administration once again relied upon the diligence of British consular officers in Europe. In announcing the new limitations, the prime minister placed the blame for the increase in interested migrants from the region squarely on the expansion of American restrictions. “The restrictive laws now in force in the United States of America had resulted … in people of the European countries endeavouring to migrate to Australia,” Bruce announced in December 1924.Footnote 50 As an added defense against the immigration of apparently unsuitable and undesirable Europeans, the Commonwealth government also required all “alien” (i.e. non-British and white) immigrants to speak English and to have forty pounds available to them upon entering Australia.Footnote 51 Given that many prospective immigrants had likely purchased expensive tickets to Australia prior to the enactment of these quotas, the federal government granted a brief grace period pending full enforcement on 31 March 1925.Footnote 52
Antagonism toward southern Europeans persisted despite the government's attempt to appease the increasingly virulent campaign against them. Writing in Milan's Corriere della Sera newspaper in 1925, Italian journalist Filippo Sacchi described the prejudice facing his countrymen in Australia. As he explained to his readers, Australians deemed “dark-skinned,” “Latin” southern Europeans to be inferior to “Nordic” and “Anglo-Saxon” immigrants from northern and western Europe. According to Sacchi, Australian nativists believed that Italians “are not white, we are olive-coloured.” He provided a litany of examples from across the political and economic spectrum to demonstrate this claim, and he believed that Australians would prohibit Italian immigration entirely if this rhetoric continued, “as though we were a second Yellow Peril (Olive Peril).”Footnote 53 This growing antipathy toward Italians in Australia was a direct result of recently imposed American immigration quotas, Sacchi believed. As he bemoaned in another article for the Italian American immigrant newspaper Corriere della d'America, “it is incredible how much prejudice [toward] Italian immigration to Australia has been caused by the rigid quota insisted upon by the United States.”Footnote 54 The Australian commissioner in New York corroborated Sacchi's reporting. The institution of harsh American quota limits had forced that city's immigrant-aid organizations to seek alternative outlets for newly prohibited European migrants, he reported, and Australia was an attractive alternative.Footnote 55
Indeed, complaints continued to arrive from disgruntled constituents around the Commonwealth in the months before the quotas became operational. A petition from a group of prominent Sydney professionals captured the central concerns of those who believed the government had still not gone far enough to ensure southern and eastern European exclusion. Like Sacchi, this group also remonstrated that American restriction represented the cause of this “inflow of undesirable aliens.” “By decreasing the quotas of the Southern and Central European immigrants and increasing those of Great Britain and Ireland,” they argued, “America has … increased the danger of a surplusage [sic] of undesirables from the former group of countries being admitted into our own.” Americans may have engendered this potential calamity, but their quota system also represented a solution. The piecemeal approach devised by the Bruce government was not enough. Instead, it was necessary to “follow the lines laid down by the United States Government, and to work out definite quotas for immigrants from every foreign country, and to insist that those quotas shall under no circumstances be exceeded.”Footnote 56 Given the inordinate difficulties inherent in establishing such a system, the Commonwealth government nevertheless remained committed to its partial – but ultimately pragmatic – implementation of America-style quotas.
CONCLUSION
The total exclusion of southern and eastern Europeans remained the implausible goal of disgruntled veteran organizations, trade unions, nativists, and their representatives in Parliament for the rest of the decade. In March 1925, the Australian commissioner in the United States, James A. M. Elder, wrote to the prime minister from his office overlooking Ellis Island in New York. His letter encapsulated the continuing misgivings of those who saw certain Europeans as a threat the White Australia ideal. Since his appointment to the United States almost a year earlier, Elder had come to appreciate why his hosts had chosen to prohibit the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. Channeling widely held American depictions, Elder characterized migrants from the Mediterranean as feckless and contemptible tenement dwellers who were responsible for increasing crime statistics and little else. Americans had rightly determined to proscribe any further influx of these people, and “the country is breathing more freely in consequence.” While Elder applauded his hosts’ belated embrace of restriction, he nevertheless feared it would have damaging consequences for Australians. As he warned Bruce, “It is clear from the inquiries received at this office that the eyes of officials of various immigration organizations in America are turned toward Australia, which is being marked as the big empty country to be exploited next, seeing that admission to America is no longer an easy matter.” He implored his government to follow the lead of the United States, “no matter how extreme or drastic” such exclusions might be.Footnote 57 In the end, extreme and drastic measures proved unnecessary. Mussolini's fascist experiment necessitated the abatement of Italian emigration in 1927, and the onset of economic depression radically constricted global migration flows in the years that followed.Footnote 58
Most of the existing literature on this period focusses our attention either on the domestic transformations engendered by restrictive quota policies, or on the transnational endeavors of the migrants who endured or transcended these policies. This episode demonstrates the importance of historicizing United States immigration policy in an international context, one which looks beyond the borders of the United States and instead follows the reverberations and consequences of American restriction into other countries. The Australian example offers one instance of the quota system's international implications. Faced with the possibility that southern and eastern European migrants would begin arriving on the Australian continent in large numbers following the effective closure of US ports, Australians reached for rhetorical and administrative tools to discriminate and restrict their entry. They drew upon the same poisoned well of racial, economic, and political angst as had Americans in the First World War's aftermath, and they feared the same specter of national degeneration that supposedly stalked wherever southern and eastern European migration flowed.
Of course, Australia was not the only place to experience the fallout from American restriction, and there are many opportunities to trace those consequences around the world. This involves looking between the cracks and around the corners of the national origins system, rather than focussing our attention either at the American border or upon those who confronted and challenged that border. How, for example, did other migrant-receiving countries and colonies experience the real and imagined swell of migration following the introduction of American quotas? How did the experiences of English-speaking Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and South Africans differ from Spanish-speaking Argentinians, Peruvians, and Chileans? What problems did American restriction cause for the newly created states and nations of postwar central, eastern, and southern Europe? How did shipping and emigration companies respond to the imposition of American quotas and the constriction of lucrative transatlantic traffic? Although exempt from the flurry of discriminatory rhetoric that afflicted other European migrants, what problems did reduced quotas cause for western and northern Europeans?
While raising significant challenges, questions of these kinds also raise exciting opportunities, since a collaborative, international, and interdisciplinary effort is required to fully uncover, map, and understand the implications of American quota policies. Questions about the effects of American restriction on the new societies and economies born of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, for example, require a knowledge of languages and historiographies beyond the ability and resources of any one researcher. Perhaps it is time to escape not only our disciplinary silos, but also our propensity to research and write alone? Only then might we begin to fully comprehend the international implications of the United States’ restrictive immigration policies.
