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The immigration debate in Australia: from Federation to World War One
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Par ... 3/ImmigrationDebate
联邦国会网站上清清楚楚地写着1901年白澳法案通过的过程。
1. 在联邦白澳法案出台之前，各州已经有地方性白澳法规以限制中国移民。
2. 首届国会几乎是全票支持白澳政策，不仅仅是执政党保护主义党和工党，还包括了反对党自由贸易党。
3. 各党对于白澳政策的分歧并不在于该不该实施白澳政策，而在于如何在不得罪英国的情况下更有效地实施白澳政策。
Immigration measures pre-1901
Prior to Federation, it was the responsibility of colonial governments to manage overseas migration. A number of colonies had already enacted legislation to restrict the entry of Chinese people before 1901. This was due in part to the increasing violence between white Australians and Chinese migrants who, since the 1850s, had travelled to Australia in search of gold. Colonial governments were so concerned about the influx of Chinese migrants that they discussed ways to prohibit Chinese immigration at the Intercolonial Conferences of 1880, 1888 and 1896.[2]
Initially, colonial governments restricted Chinese migration based upon shipping tons, accepting one Chinese migrant for every ten tons of a ship’s burden. By 1888 this ratio had increased to one migrant for every 500 tons.[3] Short of national legislation prohibiting the entry of Chinese migrants, the shipping ton quota effectively prevented the majority of Chinese migration to Australia.[4]
A number of the colonial governments also introduced written tests to restrict non-white immigration. This was a significant development because from 1901 federal parliamentarians considered the written applications, in addition to immigration restriction laws in Natal, South Africa (1897) and New Zealand (1899), to be the basis from which the soon-to-be introduced Immigration Restriction Act 1901 could be strengthened.[5]
The written test contained in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was more rigorous than those administered by the New South Wales (1898), Tasmanian (1898) and West Australian (1897) colonies, in that it required applicants to undertake a dictation test.[6] Historian Myra Willard, in her account of the White Australia policy, explained that the dictation test was a more effective measure to restrict immigration than existing colonial legislation: ‘The elasticity of the method [to exclude immigrants] was thus increased, and any evasion of it by sham knowledge was made practically impossible’.[7]
In 1900, section 51(xxvii) of the Australian Constitution granted the powers of immigration and emigration to the Australian Parliament, although a number of state governments conducted migration assistance schemes into the early twentieth century.[8]
Immigration Restriction Act 1901
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the Australian Government to deal with immigration. It restricted the migration of non-British peoples to Australia and symbolised the birth of what came to be known as the White Australia policy.[9] The Act prohibited the entry of any person who failed to write out a passage of 50 words in any European language as dictated by a Customs officer.[10]
Parliamentary debate over the legislation was not about whether it was morally wrong to restrict non-white immigration. Senators and members were almost exclusively concerned with whether the dictation test would achieve the objective of prohibiting non-white immigration to Australia without being seen to contradict the British Government’s stated commitment to non-discrimination on racial grounds.[11]
A number of members argued that the Bill should explicitly ban people on the basis of their race.[12] The Acting Leader of the Opposition, William McMillan (FT), [13] was a strong supporter of this position:
It is better for us, if we are to deal with this question at all, to put in an Act of Parliament exactly what we mean. What we mean ... is that we will prevent any large infiltration of alien elements into the component parts of our national life, and that we will preserve pure for all time the British element with which we started.[14]
There were few members who did not agree with the purpose of the Bill. Those members who objected to an explicit ban of non-white races did so on the grounds that the British Government was opposed to racial discrimination. [15] When introducing the Bill, Prime Minister Edmund Barton (PROT) warned that prohibiting immigrants because of the colour of their skin could affect Australia’s relations with Britain:
It is not a desirable thing in our legislation to make discriminations which will complicate the foreign relations of the Empire. It would be of untold evil and harm to us—and likely to lead to troubles even rivalling those which the future may bring forth to us from these causes.[16]
William McMillan, who was forthcoming in his views on race, articulated the crux of the new Parliament’s position:
We must undoubtedly see that we should do nothing to wilfully interfere with that union between ourselves and the country from which we have sprung, which is not merely one of affection or one of race, but one also of mutual interest. On the other hand we must recollect the great and impressive fact that we are a people situated practically in the eastern seas ... We must also recollect that the northern portion of our continent lies in close proximity to millions and millions of people of an alien and servile character.[17]
It is clear from members’ speeches that the Immigration Restriction Bill was about racial exclusion. William McMillan spoke about the desire ‘to prevent any alien or servile races from so occupying large territories in Australia, as to mix and interfuse, not merely among themselves, but with our own people’.[18] The Leader of the Australian Labor Party, John Christian Watson, also expressed his concerns about ‘racial contamination’, declaring:
The objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia ... lies in the main in the possibility and probability of racial contamination ... The racial aspect of the question [to restrict migration to Australia], in my opinion, is the larger and more important one.[19]
Members who spoke about the ‘purity’ of the white race were expressing their belief in the superiority of white people. Prime Minister Barton affirmed this position by declaring that democratic principles of equality did not extend to race:
I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races—I think no one wants convincing of this fact—unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is a deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality [sic]. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.[20]
Underlying these comments was the fear of invasion. Prime Minister Barton warned that the dangers of invasion would become ‘inevitable’ if Australia was not ‘careful’. [21] During his second reading speech, Prime Minister Barton quoted extensively from Professor Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: a Forecast, which predicted the territorial and economic expansion of the ‘black and yellow races’. He quoted verbatim:
The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races ... We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs ... Is that not something to guard against? We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilization.[22]
The Attorney-General, Alfred Deakin (PROT), who posited that ‘the unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race’, used the rhetoric of national survival to emphasise the considered gravity of the task at hand:
We here find ourselves touching the profoundest instinct of individual or nation—the instinct of self-preservation—for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake.[23]
In the same speech, Deakin mentioned the ‘coloured races’ surrounding Australia that were ‘inclined to invade our shores’.[24]
The possibility that migrant labourers would usurp Australian jobs was another reason members supported the Bill. Malcolm McEacharn (PROT), when moving an amendment to replace ‘English language’ with a ‘European language’, stated: ‘I recognise that if Japanese can come here in any large number, they will compete at low rates with white labour, and I will be no party to that’.[25]
John Watson (ALP) warned that ‘coloured undesirables’ were not only taking the jobs of white labourers, but were also thriving business owners:
At the present time in Sydney, we have whole streets which are practically given up to the businesses conducted by Chinese, Syrians, and other coloured aliens, and one cannot go today into more than five towns of any importance in the country districts of New South Wales without finding two, three, or perhaps half-a-dozen coloured storekeepers apparently doing a thriving business.[26]
For Watson, this activity was a sign that Asian invasion was underway and made the task before the Parliament so much more pressing:
In each and every avenue of life we find the competition of the coloured races insidiously creeping in, and if we are to maintain the standard of living we think necessary, in order that our people may be brought up with a degree of comfort, and with scholastic advantages which will conduce to the improvement and general advancement of the nation, some pause must be made in regard to the extension of the competition of the coloured aliens generally.[27]
One member of parliament who did not believe the rhetoric about Asian invasion was Arthur Bruce Smith (FT). He expressed his opinion on the Bill:
The public have been told over and over again that the purity and whiteness of the Australian Commonwealth is being endangered by the incursion of these hordes of Asiatics. I say that it is a fable; that it is altogether a fairy story.[28]
Smith’s speech, exceptional for its objection to the rhetoric of Asian invasion, supported the Japanese Consul-General’s argument that the Japanese people were of a higher standard of civilisation than African, Pacific Islander and other Asian people. Therefore, Smith believed that Japanese people should be treated as equal to Europeans.[29] From Smith’s perspective, members stoked fears of invasion because it was politically expedient: ‘I venture to say that a large part of the scare is founded upon a desire to make political capital by appealing to some of the worst instincts in some of the more credulous of the people’.[30]
Given the almost uniform consensus regarding immigration restrictions, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Leader of the Opposition, George Reid (FT), distanced himself from Smith’s statements, stating: ‘I suppose there is not a single member of this Chamber who does not honestly desire to prevent the influx of a large number of the coloured races of the world’. [31]
Reid’s comments were substantiated by the successful passage of the Bill through both Houses of Parliament. The Immigration Restriction Bill received Royal Assent on 23 December 1901. |
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虽然不是本命年，可是最近实在是倒霉悲催了。记录颌面骨折，牙齿修复等看病经历。 (2016-10-28) peanut 
楼主:onlysesia
发表于 2018-4-11 10:52
