No Asians allowed: The 'white Australia' and 'white Canada' immigration policies

Canada and Australia have many things in common: similar colonial origins, a shared language, federal political systems and a parliamentary democracy, and territories of continental size with only small populations. Both countries have been nations of immigration, and both continue to rely on immigration for population growth and economic development.; The immigration histories have been similar as well. Both nations' governments enacted restrictive immigration laws early in the twentieth century designed primarily to prohibit Asians from entering, working, and settling. These restrictive laws were eliminated in Canada in 1962 but not until 1973 in Australia. This study compares the immigration histories of Canada and Australia and presents a framework for examining the similarities and differences in the dismantling of these restrictive laws, known as the ‘white Canada’ and ‘white Australia’ policies.; Immigration policy is one of the public policy areas that evidences the most dramatic impact upon society: it affects the social, economic, cultural, religious, and foreign policy concerns of both the receiving and the sending nations. Five major theoretical areas of public policy are extended to the immigration domain: structure-functionalism; capitalist development; democratic politics; transnational contexts; and the impact of states. Hypotheses are tested to determine the conditions under which a state will change its policy away from racially-based immigration policy. These conditions include stability of the state's labor market; racial or ethnic heterogeneity of the state's major trading partners; the state's movement from a peripheral to a core economic status; the development of a dual labor-market structure within the state; the extent of power and scope of protest groups and key actors; the access to participative democratic processes within the state; and the extent of the state's participation in a transnational discourse on human rights.; Results suggest that economic development is a necessary but insufficient condition for immigration policy change. Additional factors include the development of a dual labor-market structure; the state's involvement in transnational discourse concerning human rights; levels of tertiary education; protest groups and key actors; access to democratic policymakers; and levels of communications infrastructure development.