Entangling Immigration and Independence

This chapter charts how Indians and Indian Americans sought to use U.S. repeal legislation as an instrument to achieve their own national and anticolonial goals. During and immediately after World War II, they cultivated transpacific networks of support for repeal spanning Delhi, Whitehall, and Washington, DC. By pairing Indian and British sources with U.S. archives, the analysis upends conventional accounts of the 1946 Luce-Celler Act as a cause originated and spearheaded by elite white racial liberals and conservative internationalists. Instead, it reveals how white Americans and later, British officials, did not take concrete action until Indians prompted them. Ultimately the effort only succeeded because Britain decided to support the change in U.S. immigration law, and Indian colonial officials were the intermediaries who made it happen.