Emotion, Colonialism and Immigration Policy

This chapter examines the connection between colonialism and the emotion of compassion in contemporary immigration policy by reviewing key discourses present in the colonial and immigration histories of Australia, the UK and the United States. It first provides an overview of the history of British colonialism and how it gave rise to the ‘civilising process’, along with the rise of the discourse of ‘benevolent colonialism’ during the second wave of empire. It then considers the emergence and development of exclusionary immigration policies from the 1890s to 2000s, focusing on the links made between race and immigration in these periods, the creation of a distinction between ‘deserving’ refugees and ‘undeserving’ asylum seekers, and the criminalisation of migration. The chapter shows how anxieties and fears about immigration have shaped the emotional regimes of immigration policy and how such regimes have been constructed around attempts to identify and exclude undesirable immigrants.