Proceeding from the assumption that Asian women are not to be trusted, especially when they were trying to enter the United Kingdom and, by extension, other “First World” nations, immigration policies in these nations focused their interrogative and investigative efforts upon the Asian woman, or more specifically her body. The humiliating virginity tests for such “suspect” candidates (1970s) is the take-off point for Smith and Marmo’s eminently readable and provocative work. Immigration policies and their execution, the authors, are effective mechanisms of the gendered bio-political.
The book charts a history of UK’s immigration control system from World War II in chapter One. With decolonization and the cultural anxieties around race (embodied in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, and its later avatars), both the Labour and Conservative parties debated not only immigration but also integration. Family reunification issues needed to be balanced with concerns over integration and the clear economic benefits of migrant labour.
The authors then move on to discuss the “border” theme, where the border divides the white British society from the colonial (i.e., dark-skinned) Other. Therefore, immigration controls, they argue, were only means of reinforcing and retaining the colonial-era distinction between races and cultures in the postcolonial era. By categorizing potential immigrants as useful or not, threatening or assimilationist, the immigration policies recalled older colonial stereotypes of the colonized subject but also evaluated them from the perspective of Britain’s economic and political needs of the moment.
These notions of useful and assimilable immigrants, they argue in chapter Three, inform the clearly racialized virginity tests. The “purity” of the South Asian woman, a perennial colonial theme, is recast, they propose, in these immigration tests. With the purported intention of preserving the heterosexual and monogamous family, the tests and controls also relied upon a specific stereotype of the Asian woman.
With the public outrage over the virginity tests, the UK government had to offer explanations and justifications for the processes. This set of responses forms the core of the next two chapters. Moving from denial to justification and finally to obfuscation, the government responses, as the authors demonstrate were woefully inadequate to explain either the racism or the sexism inherent in the virginity tests. Indo-British relations were affected and international players such as the UN were embroiled in the scandal of virginity tests. Discussions of compensatory payments and rights violations that followed are the subjects of the short chapter five. The bio-political regime, the authors propose in their concluding chapter, has not disappeared but has merely taken new forms. Blood tests, for instance, and DNA testing for parentage are part and parcel of the immigration control systems and the onus is on the woman, usually, to prove the “true” nature of their (Asian) family unit and kinship.
Smith and Marmo’s book is disturbing, mainly because it takes apart the rhetoric of “welcoming” immigration systems or “dignified” procedures. Then, by demonstrating links of the contemporary systems of control and their ideological foundations in colonial tropes, stereotypes, and biases, they document a frightening continuity. The gendered bio-political regime, as they present it, has only grown more sophisticated but exists as healthily as ever. In the globalized and cosmopolitan world of today, this kind of study is relevant for the unpacking it does of historical continuities in the present moment: demonstrating that cosmopolitanism does not necessarily erode the colonial pasts, and certainly not for Asian women.
