British Legal Opinion about Immigration and Sovereignty, 1833–1906

In the early nineteenth century, parliamentarians in Britain debated whether the Crown’s prerogative could be used to exclude and deport aliens. These arguments were later expanded in litigation about the immigration practices of the British colonies. On behalf of the colonies, some lawyers proposed that the executive powers of colonial officials were informed by the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel, who had claimed that the state could forbid the entry of foreigners. But across three disputes, from Mauritius (1830s), Australia (1880s), and Canada (1900s), lawyers in the colonies and in London revealed several doubts about this line of thought. In doing so, they expressed a more general skepticism about the relevance of sovereignty to immigration control.