In Britain, the first border controls were put in place with the Aliens Act of 1793, as a drastic measure to prevent French republicans from crossing the Channel and fomenting revolution. A few years later the perceived danger had passed
In Britain, the first border controls were put in place with the Aliens Act of 1793, as a drastic measure to prevent French republicans from crossing the Channel and fomenting revolution. A few years later the perceived danger had passed and the controls were lifted.
It’s hard to imagine border control as a temporary emergency measure today, but that’s exactly how it was originally conceived. Lasting border controls only came to Britain just over a hundred years ago with the 1905 Aliens Act. Some of you might have known grandparents and great-grandparents to whom passports, borders, and immigration were quite novel.
Although not explicit in its wording, it was well known that the 1905 Act was drafted to deal with the “problem” of immigrant Jews, who were fleeing violent pogroms in Russia that killed thousands. The law was, and remains, in essence racist. The same is true for similar ground-breaking border control laws in the US (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) and Australia (the White Australia Policy started in 1901).
Following these early racists forays, borders really took off after the First and Second World Wars, with the rise of the nation state. Henceforth, for reasons of geopolitical organisation and economic exploitation, every corner of the earth must have a sovereign master, demarcated with borders from its neighbour. New nation states appeared overnight, defined only by lines drawn on a map. Where on earth was Palestine, where Israel? Where was India, where Pakistan? They were all invented and the borders often arbitrarily drawn by fallible administrators thousands of miles away.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a nation state as:
an independent political state formed from a peopl