By 1937, Austria’s right-wing newspapers were also lending their support to a new population index and immigration law with the same anti-Semitic overtones as the council chamber discussions of the bill. It must be noted here that the Austro-fascist state had banned the social democratic press and the Nazi Party organs, and had appointed commissioners over the editorships of the German-nationalist newspapers, which dominated the small provincial towns such as Linz, Graz and Salzburg. The German-nationalist newspapers in particular came under heavy scrutiny by the censor for their pro-Hitler sentiments. But on other issues, such as minority politics, or the immigration debate, these newspapers could also be counted on to support the Austro-fascist government. ^[38] In Graz, the Volksblatt welcomed new legislation to restrict foreigners living and working in Austria, claiming that foreign workers in Austria were taking jobs from unemployed Austrians and citing Carinthia as an example, with 11 000 foreign workers and 15 000 ‘native’ Austrians out of work. ^[39] The Styrian Tagespost also justified a more restrictive immigration policy by inferring that nearly all foreign workers in Austria were Jews. An editorial on 16 February 1937 claimed that as many foreigners had gained employment in Vienna in 1936 as Austrians had been looking for work. It alleged that foreigners exploited the Austrian economy by taking the profits outside the country, enabling the families of these foreigners to seek passage to Austria at the expense and exploitation of Austrian families. ^[40]

In Vienna, the Wiener Neueste Nachrichten ran six headline stories on the ‘invasion’ of Jews from Eastern Europe in a two-month period alone. ^[41] In its New Year’s Eve article in 1937, the newspaper called for a border block against theJews: ‘Austria needs an immigration law that takes into account the changing circumstances and protects the native population from the invasion of a locust swarm from the east.’ ^[42] Two days later, the newspaper published a letter to the editor, affirming the editorial’s view that it ‘is the uncontested right of the state to ban or control immigration…Austria needs neither the labour nor the financial ownership of the Eastern European Jews’. ^[43] A notice in the Wiener Neuste Nachrichten for a public lecture series on ‘The foreign guest in Austria’ suggested that there were more than a few anti-immigration activists among the newspapers’ readers and editors alike. ^[44]

The newspapers tended to conflate the refugees during World War I and those from Germany after 1933 into one ostensible flood of unwanted Jewish immigration. The Tagespost claimed that

The Wiener Neueste Nachrichten also drew parallels between the wartime and post-1933 immigration. A front-page editorial on 17 December 1937 suggested that Austria was an attractive destination for German Jewish refugees because they had relatives in Vienna who had arrived from Poland and Russia after the war. The editorial claimed that attempts by the Austrian authorities to restrict immigration would be impossible, due to the well-organised, clandestine smuggling groups who allegedly provided false identity papers for the refugees. The newspaper estimated that between 100 and 150 people arrived without passports each month and found lodging and black-market work in Austria, prompting the newspaper to sound a clarion call for tighter controls on Jewish immigration: ‘Protect our borders and our country from a new flood of Eastern European Jews!’ ^[46]

Such was the vehemence of these newspapers’ anti-immigration lobby that even The Times correspondent in Vienna, Douglas Reed, noted their sentiments. He reported that Austria had ‘been flooded with immigrants from Germany and Poland, a fair proportion of whom have criminal records’ and he predicted that ‘a closer scrutiny is inevitable sooner or later’. He defended these sentiments as having ‘nothing to do with anti-Semitism’ and informed his English readers that the ‘bulk of opinion in Austria sympathises with the views of these two newspapers’. ^[47] Reed’s broad brushstrokes painted a sympathetic picture abroad that the Austrian authorities could scarcely have hoped for as vindication for their brand of population politics.

Population policies in Austria, as in Italy, were ‘audacious in their aspirations but modest in their accomplishments’, constrained as they were by the economic crisis in the 1930s. ^[48] Not only in fascist regimes, but elsewhere in Europe—in France, Britain, Belgium and Holland—as well as further afield in the United States and Australia, attempts to regulate the entry and residency of foreigners were a feature of protectionist labour policies against foreign workers. ^[49] But it was in fascist states that the legislation rapidly extended beyond economic protectionism to encompass the wider political and social spheres of citizens’ everyday lives: from one’s place of baptism and marriage to one’s position of employment, and that of one’s relatives. Even the act of registration was no longer just a parochial affair, with state-appointed inspectors poised to swoop on any inconsistencies in the paperwork and report back to the central authorities. In Austria, if we consider what was accomplished even if just at the level of legislative discussions, we can see that what took more than seven years for the Italian fascists to put in place required less than three in Austria. Moreover, the Austrian legislative discussions in 1935 predated by a few years Nazi Germany’s first population registration in 1938 and introduction of a national card index in 1939. ^[50] Therefore an examination of Austrian population politics in the interwar years needs to be placed in a larger context of European right-wing efforts to remake states and citizens on multiple levels: not just as mothers giving birth to soldiers, or programs for genetic breeding, which are the more commonly known spheres of population management in fascist states, but in the creeping legislation that sought to control society through controlling the mobility of the population and by declaring them members of the nation by way of a stamped piece of paper.