Another interesting episode from Götz Aly’s book on 2/3 of a century of European antisemitism (1880-1945): At the conference convened in Évian, France in 1938, where representatives of the world’s democracies met to try to create a common policy on Jewish refugees, the Australian trade minister Thomas W. White explained Australia’s refusal to accept any Jewish refugees thus:
As Australia at present has no race problem at present, I think everyone will understand that we are in no hurry to import one.
From the perspective of modern race consciousness it is fascinating to see the Australia of 1938, with its marginalised and near-genocidally oppressed aboriginal population, seen as self evidently lacking a “race problem”, whereas the immigration of some thousands of Jewish refugees would self-evidently create one.
The Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King similarly believed that no good could come of tainting the pure Canadian race:
My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one… We must… seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood, as much the same thing as lies at the basis of the Oriental problem. I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews.
(The exact quote comes from this paper.)
Common Infirmities 