The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 1913. UNDESIRABLE IMMIGRANTS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 78, 6 August 1913, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 1913. UNDESIRABLE IMMIGRANTS.

The recently passed South .African measure dealing with immigration is considered to have settled a very okl question. As in America and Australasia the influx of Asiatics has been a source of uneasiness and even before the Boer War white traders had induced the Republics to adopt stringent measures for dealing with Asiatic traders. This became an Imperial grievance, and when the war was over Lord Milner found that his most vociferous supporters were most . eager against Asiatics. Lord Selborne sided with the white traders, and General Smuts, as Colonial Secretary of the Transvaal, passed a Draconian Act against the. Asiatics and the Imperial Government refrained from vetoing the Act. Hostilities then broke out between the Transvaal Government and continued till Union, and final settlements succeeded each other on an average of two to three times a year. Feeling was naturally stirred up in India, and the Imperial Government urged and entreated the Union Government to settle the question by legislation. Last year General Smuts's bill encountered such vehement opposition from all sides that it was quietly dropped. Now Mr Abraham Fischer is Minister of the Interior, having succeeded General Smuts in that position, and he has managed to pilot safely through the House of Assembly i a bill which the Imperial Government ; regards as at any rate tolerable. What J Mr Fischer's bill really does is to find a formula which may serve to exclude Asiatics without expressly mentioning them, and. therefore to do what the

people of South Africa want without particularly outraging the feelings of Indians. The Minister is empowered to refuse ingress to all whom he deelins undesirable on economic grounds or by reason of heir habits of life. But it does not seem quite so easy to work as it looks. The fact is the Asiatic generally is waking up to what these sort of restrictions mean and he resents them. The problem is one that Anglo-Saxons will have difficulty in solving.