Description
Book SynopsisIn the early 1900s, panic over the arrival of South Asian immigrants swept up and down the west coast of North America. While racism and fear of labour competition were at the heart of this furor, public leaders including physicians, union leaders, civil servants, journalists, and politicians latched on to unsubstantiated public health concerns to justify the exclusion of South Asians from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California.
Not Fit to Stay examines how and why South Asians were excluded from immigration through legislation that took effect in Canada and the United States in the early twentieth century. This book is an important study of how white North Americans saw first-wave South Asian immigrants as separate from, and inferior to, other groups in the evolving racial hierarchy on the west coast of North America.
Trade ReviewNot Fit to Stay acquaints modern readers with the “hookworm strategy” of immigration law. The facts are raw. Historian Dr. Isabel Wallace is a skillful writer. The effect is startling. If bigotry is rooted in fear and economic despair, Wallace’s research proves even the mildest society is capable of devising something akin to the Nuremberg Laws … Not Fit To Stay is an extraordinary story, meticulously documented.
-- Holly Doan * Blacklock's Reporter *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1 “Leprosy and Plague Riot in Their Blood”: The Germination of a Thesis, 1906
2 Riots, Plague, and the Advent of Executive Exclusion
3 “The Public Health Must Prevail”: Enforcing Exclusion
4 Amoebic and Social Parasites, 1910–13
5 South Asians, Public Health, and Eugenic Theory
6 Franchise Denied
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
