British Migrants, Criminality and Deportation: Shaping the Australian Post-war Approach

Abstract

The British preference of Australian immigration policy was challenged by the demands of a rapidly expanding postwar program overseen by the newly-established Department of Immigration. An essential function of the Department was the screening of prospective migrants against criteria shaped by national population policy preferences. This paper examines Australia's postwar immigration security screening policies in domestic and international contexts. It compares the immigration department's approaches to immigrating British subjects with their approaches to those from other national and ethnic backgrounds. We explain how assumptions about the free passage of British subjects across empire could persist until the 1970s despite revelations that Australian authorities were powerless to stop those with serious criminal histories gaining entry to the country. These revelations about risky British migrants exposed the limits of Australian control over entry and exclusion, while illuminating the emerging frameworks of postwar border controls.

Immigration and Criminality: Australia's Post‐War Inquiries

“…12 Yet the interrelationship that legal scholars have identified between policing and immigration powers is not a recent development. 16 The monitoring of crime and immigration has a long entangled history in Australia. 13 In the decades before the creation of the Department of Immigration, police in the interwar years remained key agents for monitoring the movements and behaviour of migrants.…”

“…The situation was altogether different in the department's treatment of British immigrants, where the preference for those immigrants meant no criminal record checks were conducted. 16 The monitoring of crime and immigration has a long entangled history in Australia.…”

Historicising Australian Deportation of 'Suspect' and 'Undesirable' Migrant Communities

“…As Finnane and Kaladelfos (2019: 23-25) have demonstrated, border control mechanisms were used to attempt to keep out migrants and visitors with criminal records and to subject those who breached immigration rules to penalties meted out by the criminal justice system. It was standard Australian practice for eligible migrants to have to produce a police report, including a summary of their police record, on their suitability as workers, as well as a health report, including X-rays (Bashford 2002;Finnane and Kaladelfos 2017;Varnava 2022). Additionally, certain migrant groups were deemed suspect or undesirable, associated with criminal, subversive or deviant behaviour, which incurred their monitoring by the police, the security services and other state agencies.…”