Table of Contents

Introduction

1 "Leprosy and Plague Riot in Their Blood": The Germination of a Thesis, 1906

2 Riots, Plague, and the Advent of Executive Exclusion

3 "The Public Health Must Prevail": Enforcing Exclusion

4 Amoebic and Social Parasites, 1910–13

5 South Asians, Public Health, and Eugenic Theory

6 Franchise Denied

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Promotional Information

Not Fit to Stay reveals how officials used panic about public-health concerns as a basis for excluding early twentieth-century South Asian immigrants from entering Canada and the United States.

About the Author

Sarah Isabel Wallace, PhD, is a lecturer in history at Trent University in Oshawa, Ontario. While a graduate student, she was awarded a Donald S. Rickerd Fellowship in Canadian–American studies. Her work has been published in the Canadian Historical Review and BC Studies.

Reviews

Not Fit to Stay acquaints modern readers with the "hookworm strategy" of immigration law. The facts are raw. Historian Dr. Isabel Wallace is a skillful writer. The effect is startling. If bigotry is rooted in fear and economic despair, Wallace's research proves even the mildest society is capable of devising something akin to the Nuremberg Laws … Not Fit To Stay is an extraordinary story, meticulously documented. - Holly Doan (Blacklock's Reporter)