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economic, labor, social and racial concerns had led the British Government to earlier
embark on a policy of increasingly restrictive immigration controls. Between 1905 and
1920 Parliament enacted four series of progressively stringent measures against the entry
of aliens which would remain operative until the outbreak of war in 1939 and beyond.
The 1905 Aliens Act was written in reaction to the mass migration of Eastern European
and Russian Jews and introduced a system of admission controls at approved ports of
entry. The poorest of the émigrés were obliged to undergo official inspection by
immigration officials who were authorized to deny admittance to refugees considered
undesirable for health, psychiatric, criminal or economic reasons (unable to demonstrate
the ability to provide for themselves and their dependents). Exceptions would be made
for those who feared persecution for religious or political reasons should they return to
their country of origin. 86
With the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 the Government issued the
Aliens Restriction Act which obligated all foreign émigrés to register with the police and
reside within specified areas. The Home Secretary was granted the power to bar or deport
any refugee; such individuals were denied the right of appeal. Thirty two thousand aliens
were interned during the conflict and 28,744 were deported. 87 The wartime Restriction
Act was formulated to be a temporary measure that would be rescinded with the coming
86 Louise London. Whitehall and the Jews 1933-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
16; B. Wasserstein, “The British Government and the German Immigration 1933-1945” in Gerhard
Hirschfeld, Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler’s Germany (London: Berg Publishers, 1984), 64;
Louise London, “British Immigration Control Procedures and Jewish Refugees 1933-1939,” in Werner E.
Mosse, Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1991), 489.
87 Colin Holmes, “The Myth of Fairness: Racial Violence in Britain 1911-1919,” History Today, 35, no.
10 (October 1, 1985): 43.
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