The Aliens Acts, passed between 1905 and 1925, marked a significant development in the history of controls on migrants in Britain. Analysing this legislation and the social realities of how it affected migrant communities allows students and educators to reveal insights into histories of migration.

It has been suggested that the Aliens Acts marked a definitive break with an earlier ‘liberal’ period of nineteenth-century migration, but historians have challenged this. For example, the 1836 Regulations of Aliens Act had already led to the identification of all ‘aliens’ arriving on ships. Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist have also emphasised the importance of the regulations which came in with the establishment of the Select Committee on Emigration and Immigration (Foreigners) in 1888. Furthermore, as Daniel Renshaw has found, deportations of Irish migrants dependent upon poor law relief were commonplace in nineteenth-century Britain.

The 1905 Aliens Act marked the first significant change during this period, as it allowed immigration officials to deny entry of migrants deemed ‘undesirable’...