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"Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door": immigrants and the guardians of privilege in Canada.

Article Excerpt
David Goutor, Guarding the Gates: The Canadian Labour Movement and Immigration, 1872-1934 (Vancouver: UBC Press 2007)

Franca lacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines 2006)

Habiba Zaman, Breaking the Iron Walk Decommodification and Immigrant Women's Labor in Canada (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2006)

THE TITLES OF THE BOOKS under review reflect the images and metaphors of gates and walls that various immigration scholars have evoked. (1) The three books deal with different forms of exclusion that certain immigrants coming (or aspiring to come) to Canada have experienced in the past 130 years. Whether forbidden to disembark on Canada's shores, precluded from expressing their cultural and ideological beliefs and principles, or prevented from getting better paid and more secure jobs, immigrants from particular countries have been subject to control, surveillance, regulation, discrimination, and racism. Throughout this time, fears of economic competition or threats to national identity have mixed with concerns over national security and the protection of economic privilege of the host society. The great migrations of modern times and the conflicting attitudes and policies of Western countries towards immigrants tell us much about the dilemmas of liberal democracy with its conflicting needs for economic growth, formal equality, and de facto exclusions of some groups from the privileges of membership.

In May 1914 the Japanese ship Komagata Maru steamed into Vancouver harbour carrying 376 South Asian immigrants sponsored by a leading Sikh businessman and the South Asian community of British Columbia. Canadian immigration officials who met the ship refused to allow the immigrants to disembark. During the two-month legal battle that ensued, the federal and provincial governments required that the immigrants remain on board the ship, and delayed provisions to them. The government won its court case and, escorted by a Canadian warship, forced the Komagata Maru to return to India. Police met the ship at the docks of Calcutta, and as the passengers disembarked, twenty were killed and others taken to jail. This unsavoury incident symbolizes, as the books under review here reveal, the Canadian immigration policy and practice which is torn between the need for immigrant workers to construct a nation and the tendency to exclude immigrants on the basis of race, culture, and class.

Both Guarding the Gates and Gatekeepers demonstrate how ambivalent Canadians have been about immigrants and the Canadian nation since that nation began. Each reveals how the idea of directed nation-building remains a cornerstone of the Canadian identity. These books show how fears and anxieties about immigrants have kept immigration a central political issue and have resulted in policies and practices aimed at directing and protecting the cultural identity and economic development of Canada.

In Guarding the Gates: The Canadian Labour Movement and Immigration, 1872-1934, David Goutor traces in detail the exclusionist views of the Canadian labour movement leaders from the 1880s until the 1930s. He argues that the ferocious anti-immigrant views of mainstream union leaders were based on the fear that immigrants would drive down wages by their mere presence and by their willingness to work for wages lower than those of Canadian workers, and especially of high-skilled craftsmen, for whom the mainstream Canadian labour movement was a voice of defence. However, while Goutor takes the union leaders at their word, he also analyzes the heavily racist anti-immigrant discourses and arguments that union leaders deployed. Goutor brilliantly shows how union leaders engaged two parallel but distinct lines of argument, one economic (immigrants as threats to Canadian wage rates) and one cultural (immigrants as threats to Canadian values). Goutor thus approaches the problem of the relative autonomy of economic and cultural factors at work in Canadian immigration history, but with little argument he accepts the economic interpretation over the cultural. Goutor examines in some detail how various peoples of the world were by class, race, and/or culture deemed unsuitable for Canadian citizenship. A hierarchy was constructed: immigrants from British and North-West Europe could be more easily assimilated than those from Southern and Eastern Europe, but Asians were beyond the pale and indeed posed a threat to the social and cultural values of Canada. Goutor devotes much of his book to these distinctions which developed in the minds of union leaders, but he is much too facile in dismissing the xenophobia of the union movement as derivative of the wage-rate argument. The weight of his own evidence might have prompted more discussion of this theoretical issue.

Goutor's methodology may account for his unwillingness to grapple more directly with the theoretical dimensions to the cultural aspects of the labour movement's views on immigration. He tells his story almost exclusively from the perspective of labour leaders and the labour press. He has many quotations to amply demonstrate the wild claims about how immigrants would destroy the country, and suggests that such views were held generally. He suggests that labour's racist views were simply a reflection of the times. As the racist ranting poured forth from labour union leaders, Goutor continually reminds us that labour's views were no different from other social and political groups. He states early in the book that his aim is not "to shame or discredit unionists...

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