51³Ô¹Ï

Topic

A Legal History of Asian Migration, Race, and Exception in British Columbia, 1885-1949

Faculty of Law

Date & location

• Wednesday, July 16, 2025
• 9:00 A.M.
• Fraser Building, Room 292

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Pooja Parmar, Faculty of Law, 51³Ô¹Ï (Supervisor)
• Prof. Maneesha Deckha, Faculty of Law, UVic (Member)
• Dr. John Lutz, Department of History, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Patricia McMahon, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Midori Ogasawara, Department of Sociology, UVic

Abstract

The dissertation sets out a new legal history of Asian migration and citizenship that refines and challenges historical knowledge about law, exemption, and racial discrimination in Canada. The literature has largely focused on the racist laws that relied on exclusions to restrain the mobility of Asians in the former British empire and commonwealth. A great many of these laws contained both exclusions and exemptions from exclusion. Exemptions were extended to both legal subjects and objects, such as persons, lands, and territories. They were enacted as statutory instruments at seemingly every level of government from colonial cities to the imperial parliament. Some spanned generations, while others popped up hastily to meet a crisis and then disappeared just as quickly. The history of legal exemptions is a story about the spread of a mode and structure of governing non-white populations bridging decisive paradigm shifts in the conceptualization of law, citizenship, and nation. The dissertation explores how laws in Canada to restrict Asian mobility and citizenship relied on both race-based exclusions and structures of exemption in pursuit of institutional legitimacy, supremacy and survival.

A Legal History of Asian Migration, Race, and Exception relies on original archival research to document, examine, and theorize the making, application, and outcomes of exemptions for Asians in British Columbia between 1885 and 1949. The laws, policies, regulations, and administrative decisions selected for study are Canada’s Chinese head tax, the continuous journey regulation, the Coal Mines Regulation Act, the Natal “formula,” and the War Measures Act. These laws discriminated against Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian, predominantly Indian, migrants and British subjects. The dissertation demonstrates that these past laws, that contained ostensible inclusions for Asian subjects, reinforced existing exclusions and created new ones. The dissertation argues, therefore, that when conceptualizing of the work that structural exemptions did, rather than the making of imperfect, conditional, or superficial inclusions, a more apt concept is racial exception. Just as the “state of exception” names the suspension of law to preserve order, the “racial exception” names the suspension of exclusion to preserve racial order. My usage of racial exception aims to describe the confluence of ideas that explain why and how statutory and common law carve outs from anti-Asian laws were created. In the first sense, “racial exception” refers to laws that exempted racialized people from certain discriminatory practices. In the second sense, a “racial exception” encompasses the full legal picture: the rule, the exemption, and how the two were meant to work together. Thus, racial exception was a legal dynamic in which groups were racialized through their holding of exemption papers, offering some form of partial inclusion within the Canadian polity, all the while, the threat of exclusion was ever present. Thus, these laws were exceptions, but not exceptional.