White Australian Policy

The White Policy in Australia

Immigration constitutes the social and history of Australia and it will also change them. According to Ward, immigration is the action of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence and immigration is made for many reasons, such as economic, political, family re-unification, natural disaster, poverty or the wish to change one's surroundings voluntarily. The Australian government enacted some laws in 1901 called white Australia policy that prevent non-white immigrations from coming to Australia（Castles & Miller, 2003）. In the 1850s, at that time, large amounts of Chinese were attracted to Australia by the gold rush. At the same time, lots of British immigrants complained about Chinese people for the reasons that their coming lead to the decline of workers’ salary and they were also angry about their traditional Chinese culture. Therefore, lots of violence happened such as Lambing Flat which is the events on the Australian goldfields in 1850s caused by the competitions between Chinese workers and European workers (Connolly, 1978). The government started to set laws to prevent Chinese from coming to Australia. In 1888, all of the Australian colonies did not accept Chinese. (Lockwood, 2003) Edmund Barton who was once the prime minister, intended to support the bill, said that, the doctrine of the equality of man was just suitable for English instead of suitable for English and Chinese." (Timothy, 2011) As a result of the white Australia policy, the number of colored people immigrants in Australia largely decreased. In 1901, there were about 47000 Asians and Polynesian in Australia, which made up about 1.25% of the whole Australian population. However, after 46 years in 1947, this number sharply increased by up to 22000 and only 6400 of these Asians and Polynesian are born oversea. The rest of these people are born in Australia or are temporary residents which only composed 0.21% of the whole...