An important contribution to the sociological study of immigration, this book will be of interest to all those in Canada concerned with the practical implications of Canada's immigration policy, and especially to immigrants themselves.
During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity. Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada. By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.
In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats’ perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals – in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms – influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats’ interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.
Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Barber and Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 1970s. Engaging life story oral histories reveal the aspirations, adventures, occasional naïveté, and challenges of these hidden immigrants. Postwar English immigrants believed they were moving to a familiar British country. Instead, like other immigrants, they found they had to deal with separation from home and family while adapting to a new country, a new landscape, and a new culture. Although English immigrants did not appear visibly different from their new neighbours, as soon as they spoke, they were immediately identified as “foreign.” Barber and Watson reveal the personal nature of the migration experience and how socio-economic structures, gender expectations, and marital status shaped possibilities and responses. In postwar North America dramatic changes in both technology and the formation of national identities influenced their new lives and helped shape their memories. Their stories contribute to our understanding of postwar immigration and fill a significant gap in the history of English migration to Canada.
In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.
In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike. Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships—strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview—both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country. Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors’ kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide—not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of “new Canadians” themselves.
Kathleen Paul challenges the usual explanation for the racism of post-war British policy. According to standard historiography, British public opinion forced the Conservative government to introduce legislation stemming the flow of dark-skinned immigrants and thereby altering an expansive nationality policy that had previously allowed all British subjects free entry into the United Kingdom. Paul's extensive archival research shows, however, that the racism of ministers and senior functionaries led rather than followed public opinion. In the late 1940s, the Labour government faced a birthrate perceived to be in decline, massive economic dislocations caused by the war, a huge national debt, severe labor shortages, and the prospective loss of international preeminence. Simultaneously, it subsidized the emigration of Britons to Australia, Canada, and other parts of the Empire, recruited Irish citizens and European refugees to work in Britain, and used regulatory changes to dissuade British subjects of color from coming to the United Kingdom. Paul contends post-war concepts of citizenship were based on a contradiction between the formal definition of who had the right to enter Britain and the informal notion of who was, or could become, really British. Whitewashing Britain extends this analysis to contemporary issues, such as the fierce engagement in the Falklands War and the curtailment of citizenship options for residents of Hong Kong. Paul finds the politics of citizenship in contemporary Britain still haunted by a mixture of imperial, economic, and demographic imperatives.
Since the 1960s, new and more diverse waves of immigrants have changed the demographic composition and the landscapes of North American cities and their suburbs. The Housing and Economic Experiences of Immigrants in U.S. and Canadian Cities is a collection of essays examining how recent immigrants have fared in getting access to jobs and housing in urban centres across the continent. Using a variety of methodologies, contributors from both countries present original research on a range of issues connected to housing and economic experiences. They offer both a broad overview and a series of detailed case studies that highlight the experiences of particular communities. This volume demonstrates that, while the United States and Canada have much in common when it comes to urban development, there are important structural and historical differences between the immigrant experiences in these two countries.
Vancouver has one of the largest populations of Chinese in North America. In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city’s Chinese residents in their search for identity between 1945 and 1980. Ng also discusses the experiences of ethnic Chinese in various Southeast Asian countries and the United States, forcing a rethinking of "Chineseness" in the diaspora. Ng juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. Though not denying the reality of racism, Ng’s account gives the Chinese people their own voice and shows that the Chinese in Vancouver had much to say and often disagreed among themselves about the meaning of being Chinese.