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The Immigration Restriction Act (IRA)

Decent Essays

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, anxiety arose in the Australian colonies about the amount of ‘coloured’ immigrants travelling to Australia, particularly from China (National Archives of Australia, 2015). Subsequently, one of the first legislations in the new Federal Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act (IRA). This Act made it almost impossible for Asians and Pacific Islanders to migrate to Australia, along with the Pacific Islander Labourers Act and the Post and Telegraph Act 1901 (NSW Migration Heritage Centre, 2010).

The aim of this and other related legislation was to limit coloured immigration and thus preserve the leadership of the British (National Archives of Australia, 2015). Two days before Christmas Day …show more content…

Australians made it clear that they wanted to conserve and protect their white colonies, since the ‘flood of foreigners’ at the time of the gold rushes (ibid). Each colony had its own anti-Chinese laws by the 1890s (ibid). The problem of Asian migration was frequently raised in the media and in political cartoons (ibid). People who had migrated from the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales) primarily made up Australia in 1900 (ibid). About 17 percent of the population were British-born (ibid). From the non-Indigenous population, 75 percent were born in Australia, and most had parents or grandparents who travelled out from Britain (ibid). While people from Asia and the Pacific Islands formed a very small proportion of the population, it was a fear of them that led to one of the first acts of the federal government being a Bill to stop them migrating into the country …show more content…

Australia wanted to remain a country of white people who lived by British traditions. Trade unions were keen to prevent labour competition from Chinese and Pacific Islander migrants who they feared would undercut wages (NSW Migration Heritage Centre, 2010).

The Outcomes

The IMA allowed the government to reject any person who 'when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer, a passage of 50 words in length in a European language directed by the officer'. An immigrant during the first year of residence. During their first years of residence, any immigrant could be assigned a Dictation Test to complete.
It was originally proposed that the Test would be in English, but it was argued that this could discourage the migration of European people and benefit Japanese people, African-American people. Instead, any 'European language' was required. To lessen offence to the Japanese, in 1905 this was changed to 'any prescribed language'(NSW Migration Heritage Centre,

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