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Australia’s Long History of Immigration, Policing and the Criminal Law

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Crimmigration in Australia

Abstract

Modern immigration is a highly regulated procedure governing the mobility of peoples between sovereign jurisdictions. This procedure has been progressively refined since the late eighteenth century through mechanisms of government that have frequently deployed the apparatus of criminal law. In this chapter we examine the long history of the intersection of criminal law and policing regimes in the service of immigration control in Australia. We take the Australian case as exemplary rather than exceptional. The particular conditions of British settlement of the convict colonies and the later construction of the White Australia Policy constitute a particular local formation of a more general phenomenon found in the development of modern states. Through a brief history of Australian immigration law and policing we highlight both the long-standing criminalisation of migration regulation breaches, and the persistent governmental concerns with the exclusion of undesirable populations, especially of those with criminal records. In the light of these histories we question the assumption that ‘crimmigration’ is a peculiarly late modern convergence of criminal law and immigration regulation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stumpf 2014, p. 245.

  2. 2.

    Aliverti 2012, p. 426. More recently Aliverti has extended this set of objections to examine especially the significance of the increasing use of strict liability underlying many contemporary British immigration offences: Aliverti 2017 and see also generally Aliverti 2015.

  3. 3.

    Aliverti 2017, p. 376. While this is not the place to explore the history of European law, it is worth noting that administrative law commonly involved an expansive use of the police power of the state from the nineteenth century onwards, and that in German states illegal migration was regarded as a crime: e.g. Fahrmeir et al. 2003.

  4. 4.

    For a more nuanced social science view of the evolution of immigration policy as ‘adaptation’ in an administrative and political context see Slaven and Boswell 2018.

  5. 5.

    Zedner 2013, pp. 49–50.

  6. 6.

    Farmer 2016; Lacey 2009; Lacey 2018.

  7. 7.

    Pickering and Weber (2013).

  8. 8.

    Markus 1979; Mountford 2016; Finnane 2014.

  9. 9.

    Finnane 2013b.

  10. 10.

    Mountford 2016; Martens 2006.

  11. 11.

    Petrow 2012.

  12. 12.

    Bergantz 2018; Speedy 2016.

  13. 13.

    Speedy 2016, p. 20.

  14. 14.

    Kimber 2013.

  15. 15.

    Frances 2007, pp. 243–244; Stewart et al. 2005. For similar prohibitions and sanctions in US immigration law and policing, see Rosenbloom 2016.

  16. 16.

    Finnane and Myrtle 2011; Cole 2001; Rodriguez 2006; Torpey 2000.

  17. 17.

    NSW Police Gazette, Sydney: Office of Inspector General of Police. 30 October 1907, p. 377.

  18. 18.

    WA Police Gazette, Perth. Government Printer. 15 September 1943, p. 386.

  19. 19.

    Day 1996; Finnane 2013a.

  20. 20.

    Fischer 1989.

  21. 21.

    Nicholls 2007, p. 54.

  22. 22.

    L’Estrange n.d.; Henderson 1976

  23. 23.

    Turner 1969; Burgmann 1995.

  24. 24.

    Day 1996; Cain 1983.

  25. 25.

    Barker 1919.

  26. 26.

    Bashford 2004; Bashford and Strange 2002.

  27. 27.

    Bashford and Howard 2004.

  28. 28.

    Smith 2018; Bailkin 2012; Bashford 2002.

  29. 29.

    Smith 2018, p. 505.

  30. 30.

    Lake and Reynolds 2008.

  31. 31.

    Nicholls 2007, p. 63.

  32. 32.

    Kaladelfos 2010.

  33. 33.

    Ibid. p. 258.

  34. 34.

    Puddifoot 1925.

  35. 35.

    Rosenberg 2006; Ngai 2004; Whitaker et al. 2012; Andrew 2009; Weiner 2013; Rosenbloom 2016.

  36. 36.

    Cain 1983; Dutton 1998, 2002; Finnane 2009.

  37. 37.

    Finnane 2009.

  38. 38.

    Rosenberg 2006.

  39. 39.

    Kuo and Fitzgerald 2016; Finnane 2010.

  40. 40.

    Finnane 2013a.

  41. 41.

    Re Yates; Ex parte Walsh.

  42. 42.

    Zogbaum 2004; R v Carter; Ex parte Kisch (‘Kisch’s Case’).

  43. 43.

    Dutton 2002; Cresciani 1980.

  44. 44.

    Tavan 2005; Macintyre 2015

  45. 45.

    Saunders 1992; Finnane 2007; Neumann 2006.

  46. 46.

    Persian 2017.

  47. 47.

    Tavan 2005; Neumann and Tavan 2009; Neumann 2004, 2015.

  48. 48.

    Finnane 2009

  49. 49.

    Finnane and Kaladelfos 2017; Kaladelfos and Featherstone 2017; Kaladelfos and Finnane 2018.

  50. 50.

    Kaladelfos and Finnane 2018.

  51. 51.

    Kaladelfos and Featherstone 2017.

  52. 52.

    Queensland Times, 5.4.1954 “Migrant’s Letter Explains Killings”, p. 1.

  53. 53.

    Townsville Daily Bulletin, 7.4.1954, “Migrant’s Health Papers Cleared”, p. 5.

  54. 54.

    The Daily Telegraph, 3.1.1951, p. 7.

  55. 55.

    Finnane and Kaladelfos 2017.

  56. 56.

    Nicholls 2007.

  57. 57.

    Horner 2014.

  58. 58.

    Deery 2005.

  59. 59.

    Terence Robson, a British fascist, initially accepted as an assisted migrant with his wife and two children, was subsequently refused entry owing to his political associations: P R Heydon to the Minister for Immigration [Billy Snedden], 21 December 1966, Security screening British migrants – policy – Part 1, NAA A6980, S250772.

  60. 60.

    Aliverti 2015, p. 17.

  61. 61.

    See e.g. the numerous European and North American nineteenth-century examples reviewed in Fahrmeir et al. 2003.

  62. 62.

    For a striking nineteenth-century example of the impact of global conditions on domestic migration policy see Zolberg’s study of the hardening of state laws in the US in the face of mass Irish and other European immigration in the 1850s: Zolberg 2003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University, Mount Gravatt, QLD, Australia

    Mark Finnane

  2. School of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Andy Kaladelfos

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  1. Mark Finnane
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Correspondence to Mark Finnane .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Peter Billings

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Finnane, M., Kaladelfos, A. (2019). Australia’s Long History of Immigration, Policing and the Criminal Law. In: Billings, P. (eds) Crimmigration in Australia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9093-7_2

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