Social Science Discrimination & Race Relations
Not Fit to Stay
Public Health Panics and South Asian Exclusion
- 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
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
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