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4.South Africa

The apartheid system was designed to maintain white domination in South Africa, and the assisted immigration laws implemented during White rule, reflected that ideology.  However the ground work was laid well before the apartheid system was officially put in place.

In 1820 the British authorities persuaded about 5,000 middle-class British immigrants  to leave Great Britain and settle on tracts of land that were being violently disputed by the Zulus and the Boers. The idea was they were supposed to provide a buffer zone, but the plan was unsuccessful because within three years, almost half of the settlers had retreated to the towns to pursue the kind of jobs they had in Britain.

From 1870 onward, there was large-scale immigration to South Africa following the discovery of gold and diamonds.  In the Transvaal, the site of the gold discoveries, the white population expanded eightfold.

In 1948, while European South Africa was facing food and housing shortages, rampant inflation an unemployment the government ramped up state-assisted immigration from Europe in what Prime Minister Smut said was an effort to ensure South Africa’s economic and industrial expansion, and to ensure the maintenance of Western civilization.

Following the implementation of the apartheid regimes immigration program, Europeans, primarily from Britain, arrived at three times the rate as they previous did. Meanwhile native Africans were being murdered, forcibly removed from their land, and immigration laws were being used to arrest those who were found in  “white designated” areas for more than 72 hours.

Although the Europeans declared South Africa a white man’s country during apartheid, immigrants from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan were considered honorary whites in the country. They were granted the same privileges as white people for the sake of maintaining diplomatic relations with the respective nations.

5.Australia

Australia’s natives have been victims of oppression in many ways and for various reasons for nearly 200 years. Their land had been taken over by European settlers, and later on they were forced to assimilate into white society.

AO Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines from 1915 to 1940, inspired by the same eugenics propaganda that informed the Blanqueamiento in Latin America, attempted to use miscegenation to breed the blackness out of the Indigenous population. Following the Second World War authorities began a slow shift away from biological assimilation to one of cultural assimilation.

From 1869 until well into the 1970s, thousands of indigenous children under 12 years of age were removed from their families to be absorbed into the white community.

To reinforce attempts to whiten Australia, the Australian government’s first act was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act. Often referred to as the ‘White Australia policy’ this effectively banned non-white migration for 50 years and offered money and jobs to immigrants with European ethnicity.

When the European invasion began in 1788, Australia’s aboriginal population was about 750,000.  In 1933, the population fell to its lowest levels. Today, more than 20 million people live on the continent, but the indigenous people make up less than 2.4%, or 563,000.