Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Border Controls 39
more crucially, people without ready means of support. All this was followed
by racist agitation in the East End, where most Jewish immigrants lived, and
scurrilous press reports referring to ‘the scum washed on our shores from
dirty water coming from foreign drain-pipes’, and so forth.
The next attempt to introduce immigration control legislation in
Parliament was in 1904, under the Tories. Their bill contained powers not
just to deport, but to refuse admission. A Liberal amendment, saying the
accusations of sweating by immigrants should be opposed by legislation
against sweating rather than the exclusion of immigrants, and that the
principle of asylum should be retained, was proposed by the Liberal MP Sir
Charles Dilke, who said the Tories had ‘raised a devil which they will find it
difficult to lay’, that immigration was declining, that sweating existed in
trades in which there were no immigrants, that the cheap labour of women
and girls was a far more serious matter for the trade unions than was the
influx of immigrant labour, and that in the past immigrants had usually met
with hostility and subsequently been accepted and even praised. Other
Liberals strongly opposed the bill, continuing the argument that the remedy
for any supposed ills was to build houses for the workers, who were needed
for industry, and to improve social and working conditions in general. The
bill was withdrawn.
It was replaced by a watered-down version in the next session of
parliament. This bill retained the principle of asylum and limited the powers
of expulsion by immigration officers to ‘undesirable aliens’, defined as
previous deportees, fugitive offenders, and the destitute who came to Britain
on ‘immigrant ships’ containing more than 20 third-class passengers. Thus
‘Potential “undesirables”’, Robin Cohen comments in Frontiers of Identity,
‘were thought to be exclusively found among the steerage passengers ...’, a
‘stunning demonstration of class justice that allowed those who could afford
cabin fares to escape examination’. The bill provided for a right to appeal to
an immigration board. The Liberals again opposed the bill. Labour members,
none of whom had spoken against the 1904 bill and some of whom had
abstained rather than voting against it, did speak and vote against the 1905
bill. Tories resorted to grotesque accusations in its support, such as the
remark by W. Hayes Fisher MP:
Just as one river could carry a certain amount of sewage, but not the sewage of the
whole Kingdom, so one portion of London cannot carry the whole of the pauper and
diseased alien immigrants who come into the country.
The Aliens Act became law in August 1905. The new entry controls required
the setting up of an Immigration Service and the recruitment of immigration
officials at the ports to determine whether immigrants were to be allowed in.
Its chief inspector, W. Haldane Porter, said to be the ‘founding father’ of the
Immigration Service, was a close associate of Major Evans-Gordon, the first
in a tradition of immigration officials with links to the far right.