Immigrant Selection and Global Subordination: A Critical Response to Sahar Akhtar

In 1908, the Canadian government passed a law to prevent immigration from British India, making the right to immigrate conditional on completing a continuous journey from the country of origin. Hundreds of thousands of European immigrants easily met this stipulation; doing so was nearly impossible for British Indians. In April 1914, Canadian authorities in Vancouver, British Columbia detained 376 British Sikh, Muslim and Hindu subjects travelling on the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru from the Punjab. The Komagata Maru incident, as it has come to be known, reminds us of the toxic role of immigration policy in promulgating anti-Asian racism in the Americas. Immigrant selection has long been a mechanism for nation building, in which the nation has been understood in racial and ethnic terms (FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014). Selection by race, ethnicity and religion is by no means a relic of the distant past. The notorious White Australia policy endured until 1966. Until the passage of the 2000 Citizenship Law, Germany provided easy access to citizenship for people of German descent but limited opportunities to naturalize even for children of immigrants born in Germany. Liberia continues to restrict citizenship to ‘persons who are Negroes or of Negro descent’ (1984 Constitution of the Republic of Liberia, Article 27).