Closing the Door

For the past two years a steady stream of Asian women and children, mostly Indians seeking reunion with husbands and parents, has poured into South Africa to join the 360,000 Asians already there. Last week the flow reached flood proportions, then stopped as suddenly as the flow of water from a reservoir when the sluice gates are closed. In late 1953 South Africa passed a law barring all future immigration of Asians into white-supremist South Africa. On the night before the law went into effect last week, the airports were jammed with last-minute arrivals. A party of 150 Asians was stranded en route in Nairobi, unable to charter a plane to make the deadline.

One of the last to get in under the wire was six-year-old Ahmed Hassan, who had been left behind with grandparents in Bombay after his parents visited India three years ago. Traveling alone, little Ahmed managed to get a seat on one of the last planes leaving Nairobi for Johannesburg. Failing that, he would have been barred from his parents' home permanently. In the future not even a baby born to a South African Asian while traveling abroad will be allowed to enter its mother's country, and a South African Asian marrying abroad will be unable to bring his bride home.

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