Colonial regimes imported then expelled Asian laborers as disposable workforce.

Evidence

More than 100,000 Indian coolies were imported to the sugar plantations of Natal in the nineteenth century. These were followed by Chinese laborers in the mines who numbered about 55,000 in 1907. In 1910, the British government ordered the repatriation of all Chinese mine laborers, and in 1913 it prohibited any further immigration from India or any other part of Asia. In 1931, 142,000 Asiatics were still in the Union and treated like African natives. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2353

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of the biopolitics/racially-excluded surplus labor mechanism in the reader’s scaffolding toolkit — Asian laborers imported for extraction then repatriated when no longer needed. — connects to: Colonial labor regimes depend on oscillating absorption and expulsion of migrant workers. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 552