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

40 Open Borders
The Tories lost heavily in the 1906 elections, but their Liberal successors
failed to repeal the act. The chauvinism stirred up by the First World War
led to the passing of a much more draconian Aliens Restriction Act in 1914
with virtually no opposition. This act empowered the Home Secretary ‘in
time of war or imminent national danger or great emergency’ to prohibit all
immigrants from landing and to deport them. During the war 21,000 aliens
were repatriated and 32,000 were interned. German wives could not buy
food in the shops and dachshunds were disembowelled in the streets.
The anti-alien fever continued after the war and led to the passing,
accompanied by yet more racist babble accusing foreigners, especially
Germans and Jews, of all kinds of iniquity, of another and even more
restrictive Aliens Restriction Act in 1919, in spite of the fact that the first one
was supposed to apply only in times of national emergency. The provisions
of this act were that any alien could be refused entry into Britain at the
discretion of an immigration officer; that in general he or she would not be
allowed in for more than three months without a work permit or visible
means of financial support; and that any alien could be deported either by
the home secretary or by the courts if his or her presence was considered ‘not
conducive to the public good’. Until 1956 there was no right of appeal. But
anyone likely to be persecuted if returned was to be granted political asylum.
In 1920 a new Aliens Order was passed. This supposedly temporary measure
was then renewed under the Expiring Laws Continuance Act every year, by
Labour as well as Tory governments, until it was superseded by the 1971
Immigration Act. Some 100 people per year were deported up to the 1960s
under the 1919 act, for no stated reasons and without right of appeal (in
1999 over 30,000 people were deported or removed).
The Labour MP Josiah Wedgewood, quoted by Paul Foot, said in
Parliament in October 1919:
Generally speaking, aliens are always hated by the people of this country. Usually
speaking, there has been a mob which has been opposed to them, but that mob has
always had leaders in high places. The Flemings were persecuted and hunted, and
the Lombards were hunted down by the London mob. Then it was the turn of the
French Protestants. I think that the same feeling holds good on this subject today.
You always have a mob of entirely uneducated people who will hunt down foreigners,
and you always have people who will make use of the passions of the mob in order to
get their own ends politically. ... Members will come forward and tell the people: ‘I
voted against these foreigners and I voted to keep them out.’
We believe that the interests of the working classes everywhere are the same, and
these gentlemen will find it difficult to spread a spirit of racial hatred amongst these
people who realize that the brotherhood of man and the international spirit of the
workers is not merely a phrase but a reality. We know that the whole of this Bill is
devised in order to satisfy the meanest political spirit of the age.
The 1919 act was opposed only by the Labour Party, all of whose members
voted against it.