An integral question throughout Canada’s history has been who is and who is not permitted to come into the country. In The Making of the Mosaic, authors Ninette Kelley, a legal and policy analyst for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Michael Trebilcock, a university law professor, effectively compile legal and political answers in the pursuit of resolving this challenging question. Divided chronologically into eleven sections spanning the beginnings of the French Colony in the 17th Century to 2002, with a strong emphasis on the era post-Confederation, this ambitious text provides a synthesis of Canadian immigration policy while simultaneously dissecting the ideological, legal, and political underpinnings behind them.
In …show more content…
It is within the wartime context that the reader comes to understand just how substantially and abruptly Canadian immigration policy can be affected by external international circumstances, and how the government found ways to construct legislation regarding these events to serve their own interests. Examples of this are shown in the prohibition of strikes through the War Labour Policy of 1918, massive deportations, and the overall exclusionary policies towards groups with “peculiar habits” and assumed to possess a “probable inability to become readily assimilated” (p. 187). For much of our country’s history then, immigration was viewed through an economic prism with race tightly intertwined with labour, using ethnic minorities when they were needed to propel Canada onto the global stage but disregarding them in times of economic downturn or heated public discourse. The geography of immigration is similarly tied to labour, particularly in Ontario and British Columbia, with immigrants being shipped to specific places for the advancement of economic gain through cheap workers. Prime Minister Mackenzie King wielded considerable influence by strongly reinforcing the idea of Canada as a …show more content…
A clear example of this was the contradictory nature of policies and responses concerning refugees. Although the Canadian public exhibited emotional involvement in the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, the negative response to providing them protection demonstrated massive inconsistencies with the “ideals that [Canada] supposedly fought for during the war (page 261). Frederick Blair, director of the Immigration Branch during this time, played a large part in further fueling anti-Semitist and contradictory attitudes, restricting the admissions policy of the Jewish community while embracing British war evacuees with open arms. The anti-left wing bias prevalent among government immigration officials did nothing to ease the systemic racism seen throughout Canada’s earlier immigration policies and yet again immigrants were used as a scapegoat, this time to protect the country’s national security. This only served to ‘other’ immigrants further, creating a strong sense of a citizen-foreigner binary, an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality that would ease subtly and slowly in the following years with the developing idea of multiculturalism and public pressure for human rights reform. The successive chapters touch on the relaxation of
In …show more content…
It is within the wartime context that the reader comes to understand just how substantially and abruptly Canadian immigration policy can be affected by external international circumstances, and how the government found ways to construct legislation regarding these events to serve their own interests. Examples of this are shown in the prohibition of strikes through the War Labour Policy of 1918, massive deportations, and the overall exclusionary policies towards groups with “peculiar habits” and assumed to possess a “probable inability to become readily assimilated” (p. 187). For much of our country’s history then, immigration was viewed through an economic prism with race tightly intertwined with labour, using ethnic minorities when they were needed to propel Canada onto the global stage but disregarding them in times of economic downturn or heated public discourse. The geography of immigration is similarly tied to labour, particularly in Ontario and British Columbia, with immigrants being shipped to specific places for the advancement of economic gain through cheap workers. Prime Minister Mackenzie King wielded considerable influence by strongly reinforcing the idea of Canada as a …show more content…
A clear example of this was the contradictory nature of policies and responses concerning refugees. Although the Canadian public exhibited emotional involvement in the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, the negative response to providing them protection demonstrated massive inconsistencies with the “ideals that [Canada] supposedly fought for during the war (page 261). Frederick Blair, director of the Immigration Branch during this time, played a large part in further fueling anti-Semitist and contradictory attitudes, restricting the admissions policy of the Jewish community while embracing British war evacuees with open arms. The anti-left wing bias prevalent among government immigration officials did nothing to ease the systemic racism seen throughout Canada’s earlier immigration policies and yet again immigrants were used as a scapegoat, this time to protect the country’s national security. This only served to ‘other’ immigrants further, creating a strong sense of a citizen-foreigner binary, an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality that would ease subtly and slowly in the following years with the developing idea of multiculturalism and public pressure for human rights reform. The successive chapters touch on the relaxation of