Canadian Immigration Issues Canada\'s Immigration

Canadian Immigration Issues

Canada's Immigration Policy Shift in the 1960s

Canada has had a history of allowing certain nationalities of people into the country as immigrants, and Canada also has a record of keeping other nationalities (based on race and ethnic heritage) out of the country. Clearly, many of the prohibitions against specific peoples of certain ethnicities can be seen as racial and ethnic bias, for any of a number of expressed reasons. Some of the reasons for excluding certain nationalities and ethnic peoples into Canada could be categorized as racial bigotry. This paper looks at Canada's controversial race-based immigration policies that led to a revision of those policies in the decade of the 1960s; also, the paper will review Canada's revamped immigration policies that were launched in the 1960s. The question of why Canada made these changes in its immigration policies cannot be answered without a review of what the policies were that cried out for revision.

Literature Review: In the article, "A hundred years of immigration to Canada 1900-1999," published by the Canadian Council for Refugees' (CCR) on their informative Web site (www.web.net/~ccr/history.html),the history of immigration into Canada is presented in great detail. In 1900, for example, 41,681 immigrants "were admitted to Canada... [and most of them who were] farmers.." from northern Europe, the U.S. Or Britain, because Clifford Sifton (Minister of Interior) believed that "...a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born to the soil...with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is good quality." While those Caucasian immigrants were welcomed into Canada, the immigration of Black Americans "was actively discouraged, often on the grounds that they were unsuitable for the climate," the CCR site reported.

Black Americans weren't the only people that were kept out of Canada based on ethnicity. In 1930, an "Order in Council" (P.C. 2115) prohibited the arrival of "any immigrant of any Asiatic race," the CCR site pointed out. And in March, 1938, F.C. Blair, head of Canadian Immigration, "...personally ensured that virtually no Jews were admitted to Canada," the CCR explains on its Web site. In hindsight, this was a particularly insensitive and a seemingly anti-Semitic policy. Moreover, it was a policy that turned tragic in 1939 when the ship St. Louis sailed to North America with 930 Jewish refugees - who had escaped the Nazis - on board, but were turned back by every nation in North America, including Canada, according to CCR. Even though 44 prominent Torontonians telegrammed Canada's Prime Minister - urging sanctuary be offered - the Jewish refugees were turned away. So the ship was forced to return to Europe where, the CCR explains, "three-quarters of the refugees died at the hands of the Nazis."

After the war, "Jews were routinely rejected" as immigrants into Canada - "ethnic prejudices" - but some European refugees were allowed in based on "...economic considerations" and "political bias" (they could not be perceived as "left wing"), CCR asserted. A new Immigration Act was passed in June, 1952, which gave immigration officials "substantial powers" to refuse anyone on the grounds of "nationality, ethnic group, geographical area of origin, peculiar customs, habits and modes of live, unsuitability with regard to the climate," along with the right to refuse entry to homosexuals.

In the American Historical Review (Kelly, et al. 2000) reviewer Carmela Patrias evaluates a book about Canadian immigration history called the Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Kelly writes that one of the co-authors of this book was at the time of publication a member of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, and that the authors believe "...that between 1867 and the 1940s, racist and anti-radical ideas gradually modified a policy dominated by business interests." And even though the "racist" policies outlined earlier in this paper came under attack by some in Canada in the "wake of WWII," the Department of Citizenship and Immigration (DCI) managed to stifle legitimate debate on that issue. How did they do that? The book Patrias reviewed indicates that up until the 1950s, the DCI didn't produce its annual immigration data ("figures and estimates") until the last day of the parliamentary session." Moreover, the courts refused to challenge decision-makers in the country's immigration bureaucracy, according to the book, "even in cases where immigrants were denied due process."

The Canadian Encyclopedia's "Immigration" section points out that the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Hitler's reign of terror brought about a great need for Canada to open its doors. However, Immigration authorities "worked not to stimulate admissions but to prevent them." And when African-Americans attempted to immigrate into Canada during this period, they were rejected as "unfit for admission on medical grounds," the encyclopedia asserts. "Millions of political opponents [of Hitler] and Jews might have survived if Canada...had offered innocent victims a home," the encyclopedia continues. Further, there were many Canadians who were embarrassed at the negative government response to refugees from Europe, but the policymakers "reacted with alarm to any pressure to accept Jews or political refugees escaping Germany," according to the encyclopedia.

There was a postwar economic upsurge in Canada, and that, the encyclopedia continues, which provided an opportunity for some immigrants from the UK and western Europe; however, during the Cold War "immigration from Eastern Europe came to a halt." Meanwhile in the postwar years reform was demanded from an earlier generation of Canadian immigrants and their children, who were "increasingly middle class and politically active," and who refused to accept status as second-class citizens since they had "sacrificed in common cause with other Canadians in the war effort," the Canadian Encyclopedia continued. This emerging middle class "rejected legally sanctioned ethnic and racial discrimination in Canada," and they also demanded "human rights reform." This lobbying effort put pressure on the Canadian government to legislate "against discrimination on account of race, religion and origin" in areas of employment, education, accommodation and indeed immigration. And hence, "the last vestiges of racial discrimination in immigration were gone from Canadian immigration legislation" by the late 1950s.

Indeed, in 1971, for the very first time in the history of Canada, non-Europeans made up the majority of those immigrants coming into Canada, the encyclopedia reported.

Even the official Canadian immigration bureau, the "Citizen and Immigration Canada" Web site (www.cic.gc.ca),is very candid about the darker days of racism and bias in Canada. "In the early 1960s," the CIC explains, it became quite obvious that Canada's "racist immigration policy was incompatible with its membership in the United Nations" as well as in the multiracial Commonwealth. So, Canada was obliged to "open its doors wider." With Ellen Fairclough's stewardship as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (1962), Canada adopted a more humanistic approach to immigration. Indeed, Canada became number three on the list of "immigrant-receiving" countries, right after the United States and Australia; this was a revelation for Canadians, to have taken steps to "eliminate racial discrimination as a major feature of its immigration policies," CIC explains.

The steps Canada took included the establishment of an Immigration Appeals Board and a points system; prospective immigrants were assigned points for education, age, English and French fluency, and possible employment opportunities. This was a more fair and objective system of receiving immigrants.

Author Monica Boyd, writing in Demography (Boyd 1976), points out that even though racism had been all but eliminated in Canada's immigration policies, in the early to mid-1960s the authorities reduced the number of immigrant visas granted due to "high rates of unemployment." The liberalizing of Canada's immigration policies led to the practice of aliens within Canada applying for immigrant status in the late 1960s; the backlog from this group "undermined Canada's immigration policy," Boyd writes, and indeed the number of aliens receiving immigrant status by 1971 and 1972 had reached 29% of "all immigrants." Many of those "aliens" were in fact "draft dodgers and deserters" who left the U.S. rather than serve in the Vietnam war, Boyd continues. An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Americans made Canada their home as a way to avoid the very unpopular Vietnam war.