border geostrategies: imagining and administering new zealand's post-world war one borders

New Zealand Geographer

(2008)

64

, 194–204 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2008.00145.x

© 2008 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2008 The New Zealand Geographical Society Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Blackwell Publishing Asia

Research Article

Border geostrategies: Imagining and administering New Zealand’s post-World War One borders

Matthew Henry

Geography Programme, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Abstract:

This paper examines the emergence of an administrative apparatus designed tofilter, and in some cases, exclude certain classes of international traveller at the NewZealand border following the end of World War One (WWI). Drawing on Walters’ (2004)ideas of ‘geostrategies’, and specifically focusing on the abolishment of permits for movementacross the Tasman Sea, the Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Act 1919 and the ImmigrationRestriction Amendment Act 1920, the paper argues that this apparatus was characterizedby shifting calculations of risk that shaped international mobility through New Zealand inprofoundly uneven ways.

Key words:

geostrategies, immigration, mobility, New Zealand.

Borders have had something of a renaissancerecently. In political geography, for example,the territorial transformations precipitated bythe collapse of Eastern Europe’s communistregimes served to both materially denaturalizethe territorial calculus of the Cold War, and tohighlight questions about the intersection ofnational identity and territory (Newman & Paasi1998; Paasi 1999). Similarly, albeit less spectacu-larly the ongoing transformation of the EuropeanUnion (EU), and the complex re-regulation ofseemingly stable borders within Europe hasserved to raise ongoing questions over thestatus of national and supra-national identity,governance and the assemblage of border regimes(Walters 2002). More recently, the September11 attacks, the consequent extension of security,and the US-led pursuit of an ongoing ‘war onterror’ has prompted investigation into theemergent conflicts between mobility, securityand national sovereignty in the age of putativeglobalization (Andreas & Beirsteker 2003;

Cunningham 2004; Salter 2007). The effect hasbeen as Newman and Paasi (1998) argue twofold.First, while delineating borders, especially stateborders, have long been a staple for geographers,there has been a growing recognition of theircontingent and contested constructedness.Second, there has been a shift towards moredynamic understandings of borders as variouslyborderlands, border-crossings and boundariesinvolving ongoing borderwork. This change invocabulary has led to borders being reimaginedas not simply involving the tightly definedseparation of state territory, but also involvingcomplex, and evolving questions of mobility,difference and imagination.

Framed by these changes this paper exploresthe re-territorialization of New Zealand’s bordersfollowing the end of World War One (WWI).Focusing on the mobility of individuals the papersuggests that the regime of governance thatemerged in New Zealand reflected deep, butunevenly imagined concerns about international

Note about the author: Matthew Henry is a lecturer in Geography at Massey University. He is currently researchingissues concerning borders and mobility.

E-mail: [email protected]

Border geostrategies

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© 2008 The AuthorJournal compilation

© 2008 The New Zealand Geographical Society

mobility. This unevenness was articulated throughthe territorialization of a range of geostrategiescalibrated to deal with different imaginaries ofconnection, threat and security. The first sectionof the paper highlights the taken-for-grantedcharacter of New Zealand’s borders, beforeshifting to introduce Walters’s (2004) notion ofgeostrategies as a means of interpreting thepost-WWI assemblage of interlinked passport,permit and immigration controls that framed theNew Zealand state’s governance of mobility.The discussion which follows is largelybased on archival, administrative records fromthe Department of Internal Affairs and theDepartment of Customs, and focuses on threeintersecting moments in the territorializationof New Zealand’s post-WWI borders: the re-regulation of a passport and permit system toallow documentless trans-Tasman movement;the creation of powers to deport undesirablemigrants; and the effort to ensure a ‘white NewZealand’ through the Immigration RestrictionAmendment Act 1920 (IRAA 1920).

Situating New Zealand’s borders

It might seem rather quixotic to spend timeexamining the construction and maintenanceof New Zealand’s borders. New Zealand isafter all an island nation and its borders arepalpably wet. Here Marston and Skegg (1989,p. 52) suggests that there exists a common-sensespatial concept of New Zealand, ‘which appliesin the absence of any provision or indicationto the contrary’. The seemingly unproblematicdefinition of New Zealand’s borders can beseen reflected in accounts of New Zealand’sgovernmental structure. For example, in Palmerand Palmer’s (2004) overview of New Zealand’sconstitutional system there is no mention ofNew Zealand’s borders other than so far as ittouches on the International Law of the Sea.Likewise, in Ringer’s (1991) similar work,discussion of New Zealand’s borders is limitedand included solely as an appendix to the maindiscussion. This lack may reflect the convergenceof an implicit realism that sees the nation-stateas the assumed unit of global politics; and theseeming naturalness of New Zealand’s bordersgiven that they do not butt against the territorialborders of another nation-state and are definedin popular imagination by the sea. However,

as Marston and Skegg (1989, p. 52) argue, ‘theNew Zealand legislature can, and frequentlydoes, define the spatial ambit of New Zealandin different ways in order to fit the purpose of aparticular piece of legislation’. Thus, despite theseeming naturalness of New Zealand’s borders,Marston and Skegg (1989) flag ongoing processesof territorialization through which the state’sspaces and its edges are in a constant state ofquiet transformation.

This lack of attention from constitutionalscholars is likewise reflected in work by geo-graphers. An examination of the key New Zea-land based outlets for academic publishing ingeography –

New Zealand Geographer, Asia-Pacific Viewpoint

(formally

Pacific Viewpoint

)and the periodic

Proceedings of the New Zea-land Geography Conference

– suggest an almostcomplete lack of attention by geographers toquestions about geopolitics or borderwork inthe New Zealand context. This point is sup-ported by Mayell (2004) who notes the work ofDalby (1993) and Johnson (1997), but arguesthat it has been scholars from history, inter-national relations and sociology rather thangeographers who have touched on issues ofgeopolitics. Moreover, and notwithstandingthe work of historians such as Borrie (1991),Brawley (1993), Murphy (2003) and O’Connor(1968), there has been little sustained exam-ination of the historical imagination, creation andadministration of the border work of the NewZealand state as it has related to immigrationrestriction. This gap that is noticeable given thevibrant body of work examining the more recentimagination, administration and experience ofmigration in the New Zealand context (for anoverview, see Trlin

et al.

2005). Into this void,then, my purpose is to begin tracing the differentways in which the New Zealand state engagedin processes of border making that involvedthe translation of the geographical imaginariesof security and threat into varied, but durable,assemblages of administrative practice followingthe end of WWI.

To provide a conceptual entry point intothis task it is useful to draw on Walters’ (2004)notion of ‘geostrategies’ as an interpretativeframework. In an earlier paper, Walters (2002)called for scholars to ‘denaturalise’ the borderby tracing the prosaic genealogies of specificborders. As part of this effort Walters (2004)

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uses the term ‘geostrategy’ to highlight theidea that borders are constructed for multiplepurposes, and that through the manner of theirimagination, construction and administrationborders are made unevenly permeable to themovement of people, ideas and objects. In thiscontext borders emerge as more than lines ofdemarcation, and instead are made to functionas sites within which the biopolitical interestsof ‘the state’ are territorialized and practisedin small but significant ways (Foucault 1997;Painter 2006; Salter 2006; Sparke 2006).

Couched in the context of the EuropeanUnion, Walters identifies four distinctive‘geostrategies’ framing the territorializationof its (and its member states’) borders: the‘networked (non)border’, ‘the march’, the‘colonial frontier’ and the ‘lime’. The first ofthese ‘geostrategies’ is that of the ‘networked(non)border’. Here, in terms which resonatewith a belief in the power of globalizationand the concomitant disappearance of theprotectionist border, the assemblage of the‘networked (non)border’ is shaped by an ongoingdesire to remove obstructions to the movementof goods, money and people. Such a desiredoes not necessarily mean a process of de-statization, but rather the re-regulation andre-definition of border spaces away from theirconception as armoured skins defining the edgeof nation-states to sites of variable control thatare framed in the first instance by a logic of con-nection and flow rather than exclusion. Thegradual re-regulation of the EU’s borders withthe former Eastern Bloc countries represents theparadigmatic example of such a ‘networked(non)border’ (Rumford 2007). The secondgeostrategy is that of the ‘march’. ‘March’ is anarchaic phrase which describes strips of inter-action between different states or peoples. Thus,a ‘march’ represents the assemblage of buffer zones(both at the edge of states and increasingly inextra-territorial spaces) designed to shield moreintegral spaces from an identified threat. TheAustralian government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ imple-mented following the 2001 Tampa Affair andinvolving the redefinition of some of Australia’soffshore islands as outside Australian stateterritory and the concomitant use of detentioncamps (inside Australia and in other SouthPacific states such as Nauru) can be seen asclearly involving the construction of a march.

The third geostrategy is that of the colonialfrontier. Here the colonial frontier serves tomark the meeting line between a self-defined‘civilizational power’ and its ‘Other’. Such spacesare dynamic, but are defined by an asymmetryinsofar as the civilizational power abrogatesto itself the right to define the nature of anyconnection, flow or exclusion. In many regardsthis geostrategy informs much of the inter-national regime of mobility relating to individualmovement that emerged post-WW1 (Torpey2000). The fourth ‘geostrategy’ consists of the‘lime’. Unlike the ‘march’ which designates aspace between powers, and unlike the colonialfrontier which marks a border of asymmetricalinteraction, the ‘lime’ demarcates a categoricaledge between power and chaos. Thus, unlike thecolonial frontier such a border is not mobile(ontologically if not territorially) but rather pro-vides a fixed and categorical point of difference.Examples of such a ‘geostrategy’ include theerection of physical barriers such as Hadrian’sWall by Rome to mark the northern most edgeof its Empire, or the use of administrative barriersin order to restrict ‘non-white’ immigration as inthe case of the Australian government’s ‘WhiteAustralia’ policy (Palfreeman 1967).

These geostrategies provide us with a meanssensitizing ourselves to the mutability ofNew Zealand’s border spaces. In this we canapproach borders as less the clean, self evidentdemarcations of enclosure, but rather as prosaicterritorializations framed and practiced indifferent ways by the state so as to serve pluralpurposes. However, in doing so we should placea caveat on our interpretive tools. There is noprogressive narrative bound into these ‘geo-strategies’. In other words there is no inevitabilityin our culminating in some form of ‘networked(non)border’. Rather, following Dean (1996)these ‘geostrategies’ should be seen as situated,non-teleological, responses to the emergentproblematization of mobility: responses thatare bound up into specific genealogies of imagi-nation and governance, but which mobilize, ‘ahistorical repertoire of governmental forms,technologies and identities’ (Walters 2004, p. 693).Consequently, the particular assemblages ofthe New Zealand state’s geostrategies shouldnot be expected to match those of the EU,indeed the very notion of geostrategies asarticulated by Walters (2004) should not be


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interpreted as a model to be tested against.Nonetheless, as Walters has suggested we shouldalso not expect that particular assemblages ofcontrol be entirely novel, a point reinforced byrecent work on the transnational formulationand administration of immigration restrictionwithin the British Empire (see Martens 2006).My discussion, then, will focus on New Zealand,but it is a discussion framed by networks ofconcerns about the governance of borders.

Territorializing the border

WWI marked a break in the governance of inter-national mobility (Torpey 2000; Salter 2003;Cresswell 2006). Torpey (2000), in particular,has persuasively argued that the state has longsought to monopolize the definition of whatconstituted ‘legitimate movement’, and that theinternational border represented one of the keypoints where that desire could be effectivelyenacted. Within this context the mobility regimethat emerged during WW1, and which was en-trenched in the following year, was characterizedby a much more intense state interest in individualmobility, and a dramatically expanded abilityto assemble governmental apparatuses to giveeffect to that interest (Torpey 2000). In thiscontext, the paper now turns to explore threefields of statization involving the redefinitionof New Zealand’s border spaces after WWI: there-regulation of a passport and permit systemin relation to trans-Tasman travel; the creationof powers to define and deport undesirablemigrants; and the efforts to ensure a ‘white NewZealand’. Collectively these three fields aresignificant because they formed the adminis-trative basis for the New Zealand state’s controlof individual, international mobility for almost60 years, and in doing so provided powerful,albeit banal, administrative support for the racia-lized imagination of a New Zealand nationalidentity.

The following discussion has been constructedfrom a range of archive sources including par-liamentary debates, newspapers and adminis-trative files from the Department of InternalAffairs and Customs Department. The use of thesedocumentary sources, especially the adminis-trative files, is framed by the concerns thatboth Thrift (2000) and Painter (2006) articulatewith understanding the prosaic and uneven

effects of the state’s efforts to govern. Thrift(2000) in particular has argued for the need toapproach mundane objects and people such asfiles and bureaucrats as having significant powerto both imagine the world and to intervene in thatworld. Seen in this way the following discussionis not to be characterized by the inevitabletranslation of representation into practice, butrather with regard for the ways in which theadministrative record provides us with a meansof tracing the power embedded in the processof translation.

Shortly following the outbreak of war in Europein August 1914, the New Zealand governmentpassed the War Regulations Act 1914 (WRA1914). Founded on the Solicitor-General’s‘necessity doctrine’ which held that the survivalof the state trumped all other considerations thisenabled the government to rule through regu-lation rather than via statute (Frame 1995). Theimmediate effect was the gazetting of a slew ofwar regulations which were designed to seal NewZealand off from enemy (specifically German)interests. Through these actions the relationshipbetween New Zealand and Germany was recastin terms of a categorical distinction between‘British civilization’ and ‘Prussian barbarism’.The gazetted regulations initially extended thestate’s interest towards those enemy aliensalready within New Zealand, but following theBritish government’s decision in early 1915 torequire passports for all British subjects leavingor entering the United Kingdom the war regu-lations were further extended to include theissuing of passports by the Department of InternalAffairs to New Zealanders travelling overseas(and especially to the United Kingdom). Inturn the passport system was complemented inlate 1915 by an exit permit system also admin-istered by the Department of Internal Affairsand involving the Police designed to preventthe unauthorized flight of military age men toAustralia and the United States (Henry 2003).Through these administrative acts we can seethe bureaucratic office, alongside the wharfside, emerging as a key place of border work.

The ostensible purpose of the exit permit sys-tem introduced in November 1915 disappearedfollowing the armistice in November 1918. How-ever, the exit permit system remained in placeinto the 1920s because New Zealand’s militaryauthorities led by Brigadier-General George

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Richardson (24/5/1920) argued that the elimi-nation of the system would enable militarydefaulters returning to New Zealand to avoiddetection and prosecution (on this issue, seeBaker 1988, pp. 201–210). Nonetheless oppositionto the passport and permit was widely arti-culated, and in September 1920 officials from thoseagencies involved in the administration of thepassport/permit system that had emerged duringWW1 – the Defence Department, Police Depart-ment, Customs Department and the Departmentof Internal Affairs – met to discuss the elimi-nation of exit permits as the

de facto

traveldocument for movement between New Zealandand Australia.

At the conference’s outset the Under-Secretaryof Internal Affairs James Hislop (11/8/1920) speltout the Australian government’s enthusiasmto see the removal of the permit system, andthe uncomfortable reality that the Australiangovernment only administered their permitsystem on a

pro forma

basis. This desire can beseen in the long history of trans-Tasman mobilitywhich, as Belich (2001) has argued, was changingby the early 20th century, but nonethelesscontinued to be bridged by significant business,labour and social networks. In this contextHislop hoped that some way could be found toaccommodate the Defence Department’s desireto track returning military defaulters and theAustralian government’s wish to remove thepermit system. Notwithstanding the DefenceDepartment’s previous opposition to the removalof the permit system during the conferenceBrigadier-General Richardson quickly rescindedhis department’s opposition to the eliminationof the permit system, commenting that hisprimary concern was now the maintenance of thepassport system, and controlling the movementof Bolshevists in and out of New Zealand.

The permit system between New Zealandand Australia was formally changed in late1920. Correspondence between Hislop (5/11/1920) and his counterpart in Australia’s Homeand Territory Department spelt out the newprocedures for travel between the two Domin-ions. Under these new procedures all ‘naturalborn British subjects’ would be able to travelbetween New Zealand and Australia withouttravel documents. Those whose status as ‘Britishsubjects’ came from naturalization would stillrequire a passport or certificate of identity,

whilst aliens would continue to require a passportto travel between the two countries.

The demarcation of subjecthood is both aproduct and strategy of statization. It is a processthat does not occur in the final instance, butrather is the contingent effect of the problemati-zation and ongoing recalculation of threat andsecurity. The re-regulation of movement controlsduring the early 1920s between Australia andNew Zealand saw the issue of military servicedismissed as a problem to be governed. But, asHislop’s (5/11/1920) letter indicated, movementbetween New Zealand and Australia would onlybecome documentless for some categories oftraveller, whilst for other travellers their move-ment remained risky and suspicious. The agree-ment reached between the New Zealand andAustralian governments over the documentlessmovement of ‘natural born British subjects’between them represented the creation of acalculated network of exception framed byan ontological assumption as to the risklesscharacter of ‘natural born British subjects’ astravelling subjects. However, for other travellersconstituted as governmental subjects withdifferent ontological statuses rather differentgeostrategies would emerge after the armisticeto embrace their movement into and throughNew Zealand.

As the ontological threat of ‘shirking’ graduallydisappeared bolshevism and radicalism emergedas new threats (Dunstall 1999). In responsethe Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Bill wasintroduced in late October 1919 followinglobbying by the Solicitor-General John Salmond(3/10/1919). Salmond feared that the system ofcontrols enacted under the WRA 1914 woulddisappear following the formal cessation of hos-tilities. Bearing Salmond’s stamp of governmen-tal despotism, Section 6a of the UndesirableImmigrants Exclusion Act 1919 (UIEA 1919)sought to provide the Attorney-General withthe discretionary power to prevent any non-resident from landing in New Zealand whowas judged to be ‘disloyal, disaffected or likelyto be a source of danger to the peace, orderand good government of New Zealand’.

In introducing the Bill to Parliament the PrimeMinister, William Massey, indicated his beliefthat its primary purpose was to prevent the entryof New Zealand’s former enemies (particularlyGermans and Austrians) into the country. On


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this point he spoke of his conviction that theprimary mistake made by both Britain and theDominions during the previous century hadbeen in welcoming all sorts of undesirablemigrants. Consequently, when war broke out‘the principal danger that Britain had to dealwith was not the enemy on the battlefield, butthe enemy within its own gates’ (NZPD 1919a,p. 831). Fortunately, during the war Britainand the Dominions had learnt the folly of suchmistakes, and in the post-war milieu it wasnecessary to make sure that no immigrantscould enter the country, ‘unless they are goingto be like ourselves, loyal to the British flag,loyal to the Empire, and loyal to our Monarchwho reigns over us’ (NZPD 1919a, p. 832).

Massey’s argument that the Bill provided anecessary prophylactic against the anarchy ofdisaffection and disloyalty was mirrored byhis fellow MPs. Speaking in the LegislativeCouncil, James Gow (NZPD 1919b) averredthat in order to perpetuate British ideals and tocreate a new Britain, New Zealand needed toclose her doors against Europe’s flotsam andjetsam. William Triggs echoed Massey’s cautionarytale regarding the folly of unrestricted admissionto New Zealand, noting that, ‘I believe that wehave a law that excludes snakes from this country,even if the effect should be that snakes whichare harmless are occasionally excluded from ourmidst’ (NZPD 1919b, p. 1225). Oliver Samueleschewed Triggs’ biblical imagery in favour ofthe language of social hygiene arguing that, ‘Aswith the spread from other parts of infectiousdiseases, so we must as far as we can protectour country from the spread of that socialdiseases and plague which we see threateningall other countries’ (NZPD 1919b, p. 1225).The hygiene metaphor was likewise used byMassey’s Attorney-General, and good friend,Sir Francis Bell who concluded that whilst somepeople might look harmless, ‘they are carriers,just like persons who, having suffered fromtyphoid and other fevers, carry the infectionabout with them; and it is the carriers I desire tostop, just as I would stop the germs of diseaseby sanitary methods’ (NZPD 1919b, p. 1229).

Bell’s vision of the Bill as a

cordon sanitaire

protecting New Zealand from the infection ofrevolutionary socialism drew on and extendedthe deeply entrenched symbolism of hygiene(Belich 2001; Bashford 2002; Wood 2005). The

imagination of threat and infection whichaccompanied the passage of the UIEA 1919,and indeed the powers of the Act, representeda categorically different form of geostrategythan that which informed the re-regulation ofmobility across the Tasman Sea. Rather than thepractices of the networked (non)border whichemerged to shape mobility between Australiaand New Zealand for

British

subjects, the powersand intent of the UIEA 1919 spoke of a bordervariously conceived as a frontier or a

lime

protect-ing New Zealanders from the pathological condi-tion of enemy aliens and revolutionary socialism.

While the general diagnosis of disloyalty anddisaffection was left to the Attorney-Generalthe Act specifically identified certain groupsas deeply, if not categorically undesirable. Inparticular s.4 of the Act required former enemysubjects (specifically Germans and Austrians) toobtain a special license issued by the Attorney-General in order to enter New Zealand, whilsts.6 enabled the government to deport unnatur-alized Germans and Austrians if they were judgedto be disloyal or disaffected by the Attorney-General. There was little opposition in Parliamenton this point. Massey argued that the Bill put inplace the important principle of public policythat, ‘Germans and Austrians are not to have,after the war, a free and unrestricted right ofentry into New Zealand’ (NZPD 1919a, p. 826).However, the specific restrictions againstGermans and Austrians only lasted until 1927when these were revoked by the War DisabilitiesRemoval Act (WDRA 1927). The broad effectof the WDR Act 1927 was to put German andAustrian subjects on the same footing as all otheraliens. George Sykes suggested that while NewZealanders had made common cause againstthe enemy during the war, ‘time has healedmany wounds.... For the sake of the world’sfuture peace we should endeavour seriously toforgive’ (NZPD 1927, p. 924). The change in thediscursive milieu from the debates surroundingthe UIEA 1919 to the WDR Act 1927 is sugges-tive of a shift in the geopolitical imagination ofNew Zealanders. A shift in which the formerenemy subjects of Germany and Austria becameless the irredeemable carriers of tyranny andanarchy and more another class of foreignerwho lay outside the self-proclaimed virtues ofBritish civilization, but who did not representa necessary ontological threat to it.

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It is hard to gauge the effect of the UIEA1919 in practice because of the fragmentarynature of the extant documentary record. Bylate 1920 the Police’s political surveillance hadidentified a widening gap between the rhetoricand intentions of militant unionism, and hadconsequently developed a more realistic appre-ciation of the level of putative threat (Dunstall1999). This growing level of appreciation mightexplain the relative quiescence surroundingthe use of the UIEA 1919, whilst the scantevidence that survives regarding the actual useof the Act’s powers reinforces an interpretationof it as a frontier geostrategy rather than a

lime

.For example, in an internal memo the Ministerof External Affairs (2/3/1920) noted thatwhilst the Defence Department had been ableto do as they pleased during the war the UIEA1919 required the Attorney-General to besatisfied that a person was disloyal, disaffectedor a clear danger to New Zealand, but that it didnot, ‘contemplate the deportation of a man merelybecause was an alien enemy’. While this evidenceis very limited it does tentatively point to the Actbeing used less as an instrument of absolutedemarcation between an irredeemably danger-ous external force and a threatened state, andmore as a dividing practice framed by theongoing modulation of a putatively serious butnot necessarily ontological threat.

It may well be that the threat identified by theUIEA 1919 was overshadowed by the ferventproblematization of race and ‘Asiatic’ immi-gration following the end of the First WorldWar (O’ Connor 1968). In this clamour race wasloudly proclaimed to be a matter of irreducibledifference. An editorial in Wellington’s

Dominion

framed this debate in stark terms, ‘The instinc-tive aversion to intermixture makes the Asiaticalso a permanently unassimilated element ina European community’ and that whilst NewZealanders had never treated ‘Asiatics’ withrepugnance, ‘they are different and you cannotsafely have two separate civilizations in onecountry’ (

Dominion

1920, p. 8). In these termswhilst a German might be a former enemy alienand potentially disloyal he or she was nonethelessstill ‘white’, and thus whilst fallen and fitfullyundesirable not irredeemable, whereas on thehand the ‘race alien’ was argued to pose a serious,ontological threat to the nation to which theonly solution was exclusion.

Whilst the New Zealand Returned Soldiers’Association was at the forefront of the re-emergence of concern at the levels of ‘Asiatic’immigration during 1919 and 1920 their senti-ments reflected the deep and ongoing problem-atization of the presence of ‘Asiatics’ that hadbeen occurring in both New Zealand and otherBritish settler societies since the mid-19thcentury (Lake 2003; Martens 2006). WilliamPember Reeves (1898, p. 325), writing in hissurvey of democracy in New Zealand andAustralia, captured the broad tenor of thisproblematization when he argued that one ofthe great virtues of the Australasian colonieswas that they had avoided being filled up with‘dark faces’, but that this was now threatenedby the proximity of the Australasian Dominionsto South-east Asia. While Reeves was unusuallyzealous in his declamation, his desire to entrenchexclusion was by no means extraordinary in itsambitions.

Throughout the late 19th century and priorto the First World War Reeves’s rhetoric wasmatched by a stream of progressively tougherpieces of legislation designed to restrict theimmigration of non-British subjects and ‘racealiens’ (both in New Zealand and elsewheresuch as in Australia and South Africa (Borrie1991; Martens 2006). Yet despite this desireto constitute the boundary between NewZealand and ‘Asia’ as a discursive

lime

, theability to enact this geostrategy was in practiceconstantly found wanting (Borrie 1991). It isin this context that the IRAA 1920 emerged assignificant because it provided the meansfor a system of exclusion which avoidedcharges of overt discrimination, but whichnonetheless enabled the maintenance of alargely ‘White’ New Zealand well into the20th century.

The IRAA 1920 was introduced by thePrime Minister William Massey as a result ofthe widespread sentiment of New Zealanders,‘that the Dominion shall be what is often calleda “white” New Zealand’ (NZPD 1920, p. 905).Debate amongst the MPs built on and reinforceda sense of the categorical separation betweena ‘white’ New Zealand and the ‘Asiatic’ threat.This threat was imagined in a variety of ways.The Labour MPs primarily focused on ‘Asiatics’as the harbingers of cheap labour which wouldthreaten the livelihood of ‘white’ workers. Other


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MPs concentrated on the need to preserve‘purity’. Josiah Hanan proclaimed that aninevitable result of the mixing of two raceswith mutually alien moral standards was, ‘asad deterioration of our race’ (NZPD 1920,p. 921). James Young linked this discourse ofracial purity to the existence of irreconcilablyalien civilizations concluding that could any,‘true Englishman stand up and urge that thisor any other Christian white country shouldopen its gates and welcomes, or even allow,the advent of numbers of people who mindsand habits are so tinged and moulded by theforces of ages and superstition’ (NZPD 1920,p. 935). Apirana Ngata quizzed Massey on theeffects of the Bill on M

a

ori, fearing that theycould be defined as undesirable immigrantsif they sought to return to New Zealand aftertravelling abroad. Massey assured Ngata thatfor the purpose of the Bill, M

a

ori would betreated as ‘honorary Europeans’. This rhetoricalpoint was not necessarily reflected in adminis-trative practice, especially in relation to theissuing of passports by the Department of InternalAffairs where it seems M

a

ori were subject to apaternalistic regime that restricted their abilityto get passports. Massey summed up the generaltemper of the MPs when he stated that, ‘Clearlywe want to keep the race as pure in this Dom-inion as it is possible to keep it’ (NZPD 1920,p. 908).

Yet within the general mood for exclusionthere were some variations in the strategy beingproposed. Holland, for one, countered theargument that an influx of ‘Asiatics’ wouldnecessarily lead to a reduction in the livingstandards of New Zealand workers by main-taining that there would be no problem, ‘Ifthey are organized into the respective unions’(NZPD 1920, p. 913). William Downie Stewart’scaution over the Bill was based on wider geo-political considerations. Drawing on the thinkingof Sir Edward Grey, Downie Stewart main-tained that whilst ‘Asiatic’ immigration couldprompt significant and swift material develop-ment, such development would be on unstablefoundations because of the conflict betweendifferent civilizations and their customs, habitsand politics. For this reason ‘Asiatic’ immigrationwas undesirable. However, he urged his fellowMPs to frame any exclusionary mechanisms insuch a way so as to avoid any unnecessary insult

to China or India. This call for a diplomaticrather than a legislative solution was rejectedwith the consensus amongst MPs being thatgiven the putative severity of the immigrationproblem the diplomatic approach was bothtoo slow and would not guarantee the totalexclusion demanded by New Zealanders.

The strength of the IRAA 1920, as outlinedby Sydney Smith, was that it gave the Ministerof Customs freedom to use administrationdiscretion to, ‘restrict the foreign element fromcoming to this country, without stating reasons’(NZPD 1920, p. 938). Unfortunately the dayto day practices of the Minister of Customs inadministering the IRAA 1920 is largely unknownbecause of a 1952 fire in the Hope-Gibbon Build-ing in Wellington which destroyed almost all ofthe Customs Department’s pre-WWII adminis-trative files (for the only prefire account, seePonton 1946). However, surviving reports pre-pared for Cabinet and detailing the CustomsDepartment’s administrative policy in the late1920s gives us some insight into the adminis-tration of exclusion. An undated, unsigned docu-ment prepared in the Minister’s Office of theCustoms Department approximately early 1928noted that the general policy relating to theimmigration of most nationalities had been moreor less established. In particular the report notedthat the longstanding policy of the Depart-ment had been to predetermine the number ofentry permits to be issued for Chinese immi-grants at the start of each year (for example,100 between 1921 and 1925, and none between1926 and 1928). The rationale for this policyechoed the parliamentary debates with thereport’s author commenting that, ‘Chinese arealien to us in race and not readily absorbedinto our people’ (Anonymous, ND, p. 2). Withinthe rhetorical and administrative frameworkof exclusion which accompanied the IRAA1920, the border controls created by the Actwere imagined in terms of a clearly defined

lime

geostrategy. Thus, the effort to excludefocused on Chinese and Indian immigrants asboth groups were framed as offering a threatto the purity, ‘Britishness’ and indeed civiliza-tional integrity of New Zealand. In these termsthe entry of those immigrants was defined asproblematic not simply because they weredifferent, but rather because they were irredeem-ably and dangerously alien.

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Conclusion

Walters (2002) asked us to ‘denaturalise’ theborder, to unravel its genealogies, and to bringforth the multiple purposes and strategies thathave transformed ‘the border’ into borders.Within this context this paper has provided abrief genealogy of the re-territorization of NewZealand’s borders immediately after the endof the First World War. Whilst the time frameof the paper might be quite constrained theeffects of this re-territorialization continued todefine the conditions of mobility across NewZealand’s borders for much of the 20th century.The agreement with Australia to allow the paper-less, reciprocal movement of New Zealand’sand Australia’s British subjects across theTasman Sea introduced in December 1920remained in place until the mid 1970s. TheUIEA 1919, shorn of its restrictions on thetravel of Germans and Austrians, remained inforce until 1989 wherein its discourse of securityand powers of deportation were consolidatedinto the broader immigration legislation. TheIRAA 1920 remained the defining feature ofNew Zealand’s immigration policy until the1970s, whilst the administrative technique ofministerial discretion which was the noveltyof the Act continues to frame New Zealand’simmigration legislation.

Thus, in the space of a couple of years between1919 and 1920 there emerged a regime of mobilitypredicated on ideas of risk, threat and difference.The effect of this regime as Cresswell (2001)has argued elsewhere was to ease and facilitatethe movement of some privileged subjectswhilst concurrently restricting and hinderingthe mobility of other subjects. However, asthis paper has indicated, the translation of thisinterest into practice was neither a simple nora unitary process. Drawing on Walters’ typologyof geostrategies, I identified three clear geo-strategies being utilized in the border legislationbetween 1919 and 1920. The first, associated withthe travel arrangement with Australia, was thatof a ‘networked (non)border’ in which naturalborn British subjects were enveloped in a sheathof assumptions and governmental practiceswhich defined their movement as desirable andunproblematic. Conversely, however, the immi-gration of ‘Asiatics’ was similarly enveloped inassumptions and practices, but these were based

on an ontological caesura which positioned‘Asiatic’ peoples as irredeemably alien and‘Asiatic’ immigration as deeply threatening.The legislation for exclusion represented thenthe institutionalization of a

lime

geostrategywhich sought to protect New Zealanders fromthe dangerously alien. Between these two geo-strategies the movement of suspicious subjectssuch as Germans and socialists saw the insti-tutionalization of a further geostrategy. Suchsubjects were regarded as threatening, but notirredeemably alien. They did not, in other words,offer a civilizational threat to New Zealanders,but nonetheless they needed to be kept at thefrontier until considered safe. This was a pointGerman and Austrian subjects crossed in 1927when specific restrictions on their movementinto New Zealand were removed.

The effect of this work is to indicate that whilst

a la

Torpey (2000) the state is almost inevitablyinterested in the movement of individualsthe nature of that interest can diverge quitedramatically according to the geographical imag-inaries of security and threat. Thus, when we talkof borders we need to be constantly mindful ofboth the genealogy of problematization whichframes the border, and the patient assemblageof the mundane practices through which prob-lematization is translated into programme andeffect. In being mindful of this unevenness thefiction of the border as the smooth dividingline between states is dissolved and insteadwe are confronted with complex and entangledgeographies of imagination and decision makingthat are simultaneously contingent, mundaneand pervasive.

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this paper was supportedby a grant from the Massey University ResearchFund.

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