Canadian Immigration Policy in the Former Half of The Twentieth Century

Introduction

Canada is a nation of immigrants, which is a widely-used phrase amongst activists, politicians, and artists to celebrate the rich and proud history of immigration in Canada . Unfortunately, the history of immigration in Canada is distant from the proud beliefs of diversity, and in truth, it shows evidence of preserving the ‘whiteness’ of the nation .

History of Racialization in Canada

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the nation required enormous amounts of labor for essential national infrastructure development such as the Canadian Pacific Railway. With an insufficient supply of domestic labor, the Canadian government accomplished the national goals by employing cheap (alternative) overseas labor, particularly from Third World peoples . In this regard, however, the problem arose with the national perception; it had to contend with the conflicting interests of preserving the ‘whiteness’ of the nation while simultaneously ensuring an adequate supply of labor .

Specifically, Thobani demonstrates an intuitive and critical interpretation on Canadian whiteness by stating: Overtly distinguishing between immigrants of ‘preferred races’ (initially British and French and, later other European nationalities) and ‘non-preferred races’ (from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa), immigrant policies worked to racialize the nation and limit access to citizenship until the 1960s and 1970s. Even as the Head Tax, the Exclusion Act, the Continuous Passage requirement and the 1910 Immigration Act all sought to tightly restrict immigration of Third World peoples for permanent settlement, European immigrants were actively and aggressively recruited to replenish the nation. Keeping the women out was thought to be an incentive to persuade the men to go back, once their labor was no longer necessary, as well as advisable for preventing the nation from being ‘polluted’ by a ‘non-preferred race’ of women and their children. This racialized and gendered immigration enabled the British and French to be defined as the two founding ‘races’ of Canada .

The Lingering Canadian Whiteness

Still, some scholars contend that racialization remains the basis for Canada’s national identity in the current phase of globalization, especially with the implementation of the Immigration Policy Review (IPR) in the mid-1990s . There was a specific reason why the Canadian government initiated the IPR. After the successive World Wars, national liberation movements in many colonized countries forced the dismantling of the British and other European empires, and challenged their colonization/racialization as inferior and irrational, which had a significant impact on Canadian immigration policy as well .

Based on the data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada: By 1993, 51.08 per cent of all immigrants came from Asia and the Pacific, 14.31 per cent from Africa and the Middle East, 13.28 per cent from South and Central America, with 3.14 per cent from the United States and 18.19 per cent from Europe . In this regard, the IPR inflames ‘racial intolerance’ by focusing on the problems with immigration of overwhelming and outnumbering non-preferred races . Namely, such races of immigrants are regarded as a threat to the social and cultural diversity of Canada. They erode and degrade the values and cohesiveness of Canada – freedom, democracy, the rule of law, the principles of justice, fairness, tolerance, and equality . Therefore, many Canadians believe that such immigrants possess criminality, disease, laziness, and ignorance of democratic values and the rule of law .

Literature Interpretation on the Canadian Whiteness

In the poem The Body Politics, Hiromi Goto, a Japanese-Canadian writer, expresses and represents the racialization within the Canadian public sphere .

I can never unzip my skin and step into another. I am happy with my colour until someone points out it clashes with my costume. I hold my culture in my hands and form it on my own, so that no one else can shape the way it lies upon my body. .

Another second-generation Japanese-Canadian writer/scholar ‘Roy Miki’ responds to Goto’s literature: So was multiculturalism just a dress code? . In this regard, Miki critically answers his question that the notion of multiculturalism in Canada: … needs to be read as a contradictory zone of vested interests, made more so by the engineering role played by the federal administration. While its more benign public face has supported cultural “diversity” and “pluralism,” the company it keeps with hierarchically structured relations of “difference” exposes a subtext of racialization .

Drawing of the banana from The Body Politics

There is metonymy in the poem that Goto’s own body implies not only a racialized and a sexualized body, but also a particular body that cannot be entirely contained by its racialization and sexualization . Namely, her body, which is a prototype of every non-preferred race, is thus shaped by, but also shapes, culture .

From the accompanying drawing of the banana, which is literally half unzipped and equipped with a single cyclopean eye, Goto endeavors to introduce: not only discourses of racialization – particularly the sneer that anyone with ‘yellow’ skin but ‘white’ insides is merely a banana, lacking in racial and cultural authenticity – but also the possibilities inherent in both hybridity and monstrosity .

Conclusion: Said’s Orientalism

The Canadian Whiteness supports Edward Said’s theoretical framework of Orientalism as valid; the way the West discusses, depicts and perceives the East is far from objective . Further, no matter how ‘objectively’ one speaks of the Orient, no production of knowledge in human science can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his/her own circumstances . To conclude, because one’s position ideologically and culturally affects how one sees and depicts physical and conceptual spaces, the immigrants’ values or problems do not always match with the way of Canadians’ agreed-upon values and cohesiveness .