1.1 Passport regimes – inclusion and exclusion
Figure 2 Komagatu Maru
We will now look more closely at the different ways in which passport regimes have functioned historically to meet social needs to regulate conduct. In the case study of early twentieth-century Canada to follow, you will see how a passport regime has been used to register individuals as part of a distinct social population. However, this process constantly leaches into efforts to categorise, sort, order and classify. At a minimum, identification and registration of individuals involve decisions about who is in and who is out. These decisions have been made on a variety of grounds including place of birth, ethnicity, race, class and – in some circumstances – gender. Categories such as race, class and gender often interact to produce sometimes subtle and sometimes overt processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Watch the video below, which is taken from an interview with sociologist Radhika Mongia, then complete Activity 1.
Download this video clip.Video player: Interview with Radhika Mongia
Transcript: Interview with Radhika Mongia
RADHIKA MONGIA
For something like the passport to function, more than one state has to be involved in the process, not only the place that's issuing the passport. But the place that you go to has to recognise this document as a travel document. So intuitively, one would imagine that it's something that different governments agreed to sort of sitting in a big room, and everyone agrees to this. And then you implement the instrument of technology for controlling movement and making it orderly.
It turns out, however, that the history of this document is much more piecemeal and a very counter-intuitive development. So a country might be issuing a passport and you arrive at another shore, and there you find that they don't recognise the document or vice versa.
I think in our world, the passport and what it means is predominantly around race and nationality of the bearer. The passport essentially dictates your access to mobility and does so along lines that are explicitly raised. So for instance, an Indian passport is more than merely Indian nationality as equivalent to any other nationality. You're already marked as a racialised subject.
And one of the arguments that I have made regarding the passport is that it's not merely a reflective technology. It's not merely a mirroring technology. It's in fact a productive technology, productive as in it secures racialised subjects.
The material, the archival sources on the Canadian case are really fascinating because what they alert us to is a very different world. So if in our world today it seems that any state can, in fact, limit the entry of certain people for whatever reasons they deem fit, in the early 20th century, this was not possible. The world was one dominated by empire.
And in the case under consideration of Indians moving to Canada, technically, both Indians and Canadians were British subjects. So they had the right to go and reside in any part of empire. Various Indians who found themselves in different parts of the globe were just sort of looking out for more opportunities, I guess.
They end up in Canada. And Canada is not at all happy with the influx of these racialised subjects. However, they're completely at a loss as to how to curtail this migration given that there's no legal precedent for doing so.
To put it bluntly, the Canadian government simply wanted a white Canada. And they began with rather sort of direct, simple claims, such as it was too cold in Canada for the Indians or that they were culturally unsuited to Canada, you know, these commonsensical kinds of objections and closed, of course, in this is, in fact, the best for the Indians themselves. So always looking out for our brothers and sisters across the way.
But of course, this has no legal basis. You know, if people want to go and shiver in Canada, then that really is their own business. So since these kinds of measures didn't work out, they then suggest more sort of systematic, legal measures.
In 1913, there were two dramatic incidents. The first of these incidents was the arrival of a ship called the Panama Maru in Vancouver with 56 Indians. Many of these Indians claimed that they had been in Canada before and were simply returning. So they already had Canadian domicile and, therefore, should be allowed entry. And they were.
This propelled Sardaar Gurdit Singh to hire a ship called the Komagata Maru to sail from Hong Kong to Vancouver. And they were hoping that their fate would be similar to that of the passengers on the Panama Maru. However, the Canadian government had meanwhile enacted some other small changes to their rules and regulations, such that they couldn't land.
And this, in fact, generated not only a furor in the Canadian House of Commons but, in fact, a massive global furor in terms of newspaper coverage and such. However, the sum total is that legally all these passengers were disallowed entry to Canada. The ship, which was anchored in harbour for a very long time, was eventually escorted out of the harbour by the entire Canadian Navy. But what this Komagata Maru incident, which is a really dramatic incident, revealed was that something sort of had to be done.
Frank Oliver in the Canadian House of Commons says, and I am quoting, that the Komagata Maru was an incident that revealed that Canada needed to manage her own immigration. And this was not, as he said, a labour question. This was not a racial question. It was a question of national dominance and the sort of national survival.
The advent of this word national into the discourse is a striking reformulation of the debate because up until then, the term had been empire, imperial. What you find now is the advent of national. And it's on the basis of this notion of national sovereignty, as opposed to imperial comity that Canada would prohibit the entry of Indians. And they would do so further on a principle of reciprocity between nations.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Interview with Radhika Mongia
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Activity 1
Answer the questions in the box below. When you have finished, read the following feedback.
- In what ways might passports produce racialised subjects?
- Is it more difficult for some people than for others to become attached to a new territory?
- Which groups of people were most subject to exclusion from Canada?
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Discussion
- Radikha Mongia suggests that passports not only mirror but produce race. This is quite a difficult argument but her analysis highlights the role of passport regimes in formalising and codifying national identities that were explicitly racialised. Thus passports create new forms of identity such that an individual is no longer simply from the Punjab but becomes the bearer of Indian national identity. In an international system which imposes different visa and admission requirements on different nationalities, passport regimes reinforce racialised national identities.
- Passport regimes make international migration,with attachment to new territories and national identities, more difficult for some than for others. The furore surrounding the Komagata Maru incident illustrates the influence of the media in drawing global attention to what the Canadian government saw as the problem of non-white immigration.
- Mongia states that Indians were excluded from Canada, and refers to the Komagatu Maru incident. More generally, she states ‘the Canadian government simply wanted a white Canada’.