History

States and rulers have always regarded the ability to determine who enters or remains in their territories as a key test of their sovereignty, but prior to World War I, border controls were only sporadically implemented. In medieval Europe, for example, the boundaries between rival countries and centres of power were largely symbolic or consisted of amorphous borderlands, ‘marches’ and ‘debatable lands’ of indeterminate or contested status and the real ‘borders’ consisted of the fortified walls that surrounded towns and cities, where the authorities could exclude undesirable or incompatible people at the gates, from vagrants, beggars and the ‘wandering poor’, to ‘masterless women’, lepers, Romani or Jews.

The concept of a travel document such as a passport needed to clear border controls in the modern sense has been traced back to the reign of Henry V of England, as a means of helping his subjects prove who they were in foreign lands. The earliest reference to these documents is found in a 1414 Act of Parliament. In 1540, granting travel documents in England became a role of the Privy Council of England, and it was around this time that the term "passport" was used. In 1794, issuing British passports became the job of the Office of the Secretary of State. The 1548 Imperial Diet of Augsburg required the public to hold imperial documents for travel, at the risk of permanent exile. During World War I, European governments introduced border passport requirements for security reasons, and to control the emigration of people with useful skills. These controls remained in place after the war, becoming a standard, though controversial, procedure. British tourists of the 1920s complained, especially about attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they considered led to a "nasty dehumanisation".

One of the earliest systematic attempts of a modern nation state to implement border controls to restrict entry of particular groups was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in America. This act aimed to implement discriminatory immigration controls on East Asians. The strict and racist border control policies had a negative impact not only on the Chinese alone but also on whites and other races as well which lasted for about thirty years. The U.S. economy suffered a great loss as a result of this Act. The Act was a sign of injustice and unfair treatment to the Chinese workers because the jobs they engaged in were mostly menial jobs. A similarly discriminatory approach to border control was taken in Canada through the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, imposing what came to be called the Chinese head tax.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire established quarantine stations on many of its borders to control disease. For example, along the Greek-Turkish border, all travelers entering and exiting the Ottoman Empire would be quarantined for 9–15 days. These stations would often be manned by armed guards. If plague appeared, the Ottoman army would be deployed to enforce border control and monitor disease.

Decolonisation during the twentieth century saw the emergence of mass emigration from nations in the Global South, thus leading former colonial occupiers to introduce stricter border controls. In the United Kingdom this process took place in stages, with British nationality law eventually shifting from recognising all Commonwealth citizens as British subjects to today’s complex British nationality law which distinguishes between British citizens, modern British Subjects, British Overseas Citizens, and overseas nationals, with each non-standard category created as a result of attempts to balance border control and the need to mitigate statelessness. This aspect of the rise of border control in the 20th century has proven controversial. The British Nationality Law 1981 has been criticised by experts,a as well as by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination of the United Nations,b on the grounds that the different classes of British nationality it created are, in fact, closely related to the ethnic origins of their holders.

The creation of British Nationality (Overseas) status, for instance, (with fewer privileges than British citizen status) was met with criticism from many Hong Kong residents who felt that British citizenship would have been more appropriate in light of the "moral debt" owed to them by the UK.cd Some British politicianse and magazinesf also criticised the creation of BN(O) status.

Ethnic tensions created during colonial occupation also resulted in discriminatory policies being adopted in newly independent African nations, such as Uganda under Idi Amin which banned Asians from Uganda, thus creating a mass exodus of the (largely Gujarati) Asian community of Uganda. Such ethnically driven border control policies took forms ranging from anti-Asian sentiment in East Africa to Apartheid policies in South Africa and Namibia (then known as Southwest Africa under South African rule) which creates bantustansg and pass lawsh to segregate and impose border controls against non-whites, and encouraged immigration of whites at the expense of Blacks as well as Indians and other Asians. Whilst border control in Europe and east of the Pacific have tightened over time, they have largely been liberalised in Africa, from Yoweri Museveni’s reversal of Idi Amin’s anti-Asian border controlsi to the fall of Apartheid (and thus racialised border controls) in South Africa.

The development of border control policies over the course of the 20th century also saw the standardisation of refugee travel documents under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951j and the 1954 Convention travel document for stateless people under the similar 1954 statelessness convention.