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Social Science Discrimination & Race Relations

Not Fit to Stay

Public Health Panics and South Asian Exclusion

by (author) Sarah Isabel Wallace

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2016
Category
Discrimination & Race Relations, Emigration & Immigration, 20th Century
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774832182
    Publish Date
    Dec 2016
    List Price
    $95.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774832212
    Publish Date
    Jan 2017
    List Price
    $24.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774832199
    Publish Date
    Jul 2017
    List Price
    $32.95

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Description

In 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.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Sarah Isabel Wallace, PhD, is a lecturer in history at Trent University in Oshawa, Ontario. While a graduate student, she was awarded a Donald S. Rickerd Fellowship in Canadian–American studies. Her work has been published in the Canadian Historical Review and BC Studies.

Editorial Reviews

Not 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.

Blacklock's Reporter

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