Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Australasian Methods of Dealing With Immigration

1904; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/000271620402400113

1552-3349

Frank M. Parsons,

Education Systems and Policy

From the first the Anglo-Saxon colonies of Australia and New Zealand have regarded the immigration problem as one of the most important that could engage the attention of their statesmen, affect- ing most vitally the public health and morals, the wage level and con- ditions of labor, freedom and civic life-determining, in fact, the quality of the materials used in the construction of their institutions and civilization.Until well toward the middle of the last century, England looked upon her colonies as convenient dumping grounds for social refuse; receptacles for criminals and paupers.Later, the influx of colored aliens, yellow, brown and black, coming spontaneously or brought in by capitalists, became a matter of serious moment.Swarms of Chinese and masses of black Melanesian laborers, called Kanakas, picked up in the islands of the Western Pacific and taken to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland, carried with them a deplorable deterioration of the labor level and constituted a dangerous breach of social homogeneity and strength.The colonies needed immi- grants to develop their resources, but such immigrants were worse than none.It was felt that the development of civic and social life on a high plane was more important than the working of mines, plantations and factories with cheap labor, or any other question of wealth production, and that immigrants unfit for free institutions and high civilization must be rejected, no matter how great the need for labor might be.From these facts and this feeling, three strong movements re- sulted : First, an agitation that aroused enlightened public sentiment in England and put an end to the dumping of convicts and social rubbish in the Australasian colonies; second, the adoption by coloniz- ing companies and the colonial governments of various plans of scientific colonization under which immigrants were carefully selected