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The Great White Wall Essay

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The Great White Wall

For most people, someone within their ancestral lineage has immigrated to a new country. Immigration has been perceived as a way to provide and enhance personal opportunities (McConville: p 73). Overpopulation began to be a problem in many of the great empires in the early 19th century, and emigration seemed to provide the best opportunity for people to better themselves in a new world (McConville: p 73). Rather than draining the resources within one society, people were given the opportunity to form a new life and use the resources in another land (McConville: p 73).

The Great White Wall

Australia became portrayed as a haven from industrial capitalism (McConville: p 73). Many immigrants began to flood …show more content…

However, for many this was seen as a way to keep the poor poorer and the rich wealthier (McConville: p 75). By 1840, the Land and Immigration Commissioners took control away from the government and began to regulate on their own the flow of emigrants into the country (McConville: p 75). The flood of immigrants increased enormously around the 1850’s but not for the support of the economy; the flow came in because of gold (McConville: p 76).

As greater waves of immigrants began to arrive to better their livelihood and compete for the gold claims, racism soon took hold within the economic, social and geographic arenas (McQueen: p 30). Fears of invasions of non-Europeans gave rise to discriminatory acts and many violent riots occurred within the 1800s and clear into the middle of the 20th century as well. In the 1880s, immigration control became known as “White Australian Policy” (Jupp: p 8). At this time, many extreme measures were being taken to ensure the white stronghold within Australia. A hierarchical preference for different nationalities was used as preface for entry onto Australian ground (Buchanan: p 2). Northern Europeans were preferred over Southern Europeans, and both groups were preferred to ‘colored’ immigrants (Buchanan: p 2). Hammond theorizes that there are four main reasons for these specific preferences. The

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