ABSTRACT
By 1920, both Britain and Germany complied with the overall restrictive turn in international migration politics. They had introduced visas, passports, and work permits. They required immigrants to register with the police, and they repeatedly deported 'undocumented migrants' who failed to comply with these regulations. This analysis thus takes London and Berlin as starting points in order to explore the changing relationship between migrants and papers, cities and states in the early twentieth century. In fact, Britain's registration policy not only emphasized the distinction between British and alien subjects, but it also distinguished between 'black' and 'white' British subjects. In Joseph Roth's literary essays on Eastern European Jewish life published in 1927, passport controls, and registration with the police appeared as a central – and despised – aspect of everyday life in Berlin. Before the war, British authorities began to use deportations in order to penalize unauthorized, undocumented movement.
