A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

In a similar vein, linked are math questions Russian universities would give to Jewish students to filter them out in entrance exams.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

Australia had something similar to implement its "White Australia" policy. Apparently, British authorities objected to explicitly racist rules. So the scheme they came up with was that the border officials could, at their discretion, ask somebody coming into the country to pass a dictation test to prove their literacy. The test could be administered in any European language. Very few people managed to pass. Details:

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-aust...

> any European language

And the immigration officer could pick the language you were to be tested in.

Which led to one account I read of an immigrant who was polyglot with an interest in different languages. He could handle all of the languages the officer tried, until Welsh.

As I recall, this ended up in court, where the judge allowed the immigration, and pointed out that none of the immigration officers could understand Welsh themselves.

The person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and who the Australian government found far too 'revolutionary' to let in.

The full story is quite fun. He was initially refused permission to disembark, which he solved by leaping five metres from the ship, thereby making landfall (rather literally). The government then tried to exclude him using a dictation test, which could indeed be in any European language, and the test he failed was administered in Scots Gaelic. Some controversy arose when it turned out that the person giving the dictation test couldn't themselves understand Scots Gaelic, but the High Court ultimately ruled in Kisch's favour for the somewhat amusing reason that Scots Gaelic was 'not a European language' (at least within the meaning of the relevant law). [0]

Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions. Laws banning non-white migration persisted in one way or another until 1973, and in the subsequent fifty years Australia has done progressively more insane things to keep people out, including removing all of Australia from the Australian migration zone (so migrants never actually 'arrive' in such a way that might give them a right to seek asylum), using the navy to put people that arrived by sea back on boats and launching them vaguely in the direction of other countries, keeping people actually accepted to be refugees (!) off-shore in remote Pacific island concentration camps for years, and - during COVID - criminalising its own citizens leaving Australia for two years (and briefly even the return of Australian citizens home). [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Ki...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052

Thank you so much for the details! I got the island right but the wrong Celtic language, which caused my searches to fail.