Hope Simpson Enquiry

The Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, commonly referred to as the Hope Simpson Enquiry or the Hope Simpson Report, was a British Commission managed by Sir John Hope Simpson, established during August 1929 to address Immigration, Land Settlement and Development issues in British Mandate of Palestine, as recommended by the Shaw Commission, after the widespread 1929 Palestine riots.

The report recommended limiting Jewish immigration based on the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine.

The mandate and ambition of the Hope-Simpson Commission was to associate the issues of immigration, land settlement, and agricultural development in a way that would allow the government to deploy policies that could serve the country as a whole.

Relying on this advice and on colonial experience elsewhere, the government later established a Water Board and drafted its first irrigation bill.

Arab politicians are sufficiently astute to realize at once what may appear an easy method of blocking that [Jewish] immigration to which they are radically averse, and attempts may and probably will be made to swell the list of Arabs unemployed with names which should not be there, or perhaps to ensure the registration of an unemployed man in the books of more than one exchange.

The rule may possibly work harshly in individual cases, but unless it is understood that detection is invariably followed by expulsion the practice will not cease.