Author Norman Ravvin's grandfather in his Polish army uniform, Warsaw, 1920s.Supplied
Norman Ravvin’s latest book is Who Gets In: An Immigration Story.
Most families have an immigration story. It’s up for grabs how well it’s remembered.
In my family the story is just under a hundred years old, so it might easily have been forgotten. Who needs a century-old story to confront everyday living? Bits and pieces of my mother’s father’s 1930 emigration from Poland to the Canadian west circulated in my childhood. This reflects an interest in family stories, but it was our founding story in Canada. However incompletely it was told, it shored us up, amused us, gave our Canadian lives a liftoff point. In truth, the need to know the story was deadly serious: if it hadn’t happened, half of us wouldn’t have been born, and the other half would likely have been murdered in German-occupied Poland.
Not every immigration story carries a punchline like that, but many do. Those that don’t are linked to some forgotten pattern of entry to a country that followed a timely economic reason: building a railroad; the need for agricultural or industrial workers; a willingness to allow single women as “domestics” into a bustling economy. You could call these sink-or-swim narratives. In each case one side of the social and economic scale was dropping while one was rising. It’s the émigré’s genius to step off the sinking scale in time to get a foothold where things are hopeful.
Popular narratives associated with immigration are often based in moral panic, prejudice or lies. Every country has its own set of circumstances that underwrite its immigration rules or openness at a given time. Canadian immigration rules have reflected growth, the movement of populations westward, early notions of the country’s “founding national identities,” shame over these ideas, and always – always – economics.
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When my grandfather arrived in 1930, the Great Depression was in view, so economic growth and the need for labourers was on the downswing. Still, a single man sponsored by a Canadian relative was allowed into the country, with “bona fide agriculturalists” being a much-desired type of labourer. There were no quotas in Canada in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as in the United States after 1924, but Canada had a strictly guarded hierarchy of preferred and non-preferred sources of newcomers. Anglo-Saxons of the British or American variety were top dog, followed by Germans and northern Europeans, with increasing efforts to exclude Black people, Jews, Asians (some of whom were at times called “Hindoos,”) and southern and eastern Europeans.
In the case of Chinese migrants, an exorbitant head tax made it next to impossible for single men who came to the country as railroad labourers to bring their families after them, and rules regarding port of departure were set up to make it impossible for Indian nationals to sail into Canadian ports.
Immigration in Canada today holds the same divided audiences it always did. There are those who might (or might not) remember their own family’s immigration story, and those who are living it in the contemporary moment.
Two particular narratives regarding immigration have dominated Canadian news in recent months. One of these follows from the U.S. President’s fantastic warnings about the pressing need to increase the vetting of people crossing the Canadian border into the United States, with related moves by our government to “improve border security” in a way that caters to the American administration. These shifts made their way into popular imagination by way of constant repetition in U.S. government edicts and press reports.
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The other narrative, which is truer to Canadian life, has focused on the number of international students attending Canadian colleges and universities with their eyes primarily on work permits, to be followed by coveted citizenship status. Colleges behind storefronts with no visible students, sitting near highway offramps in suburban Toronto, were the worst-case scenario. Related to this is the assertion that a Canadian housing shortage was partially motivated by an influx of international students. From these concerns came a major cutback across the country in international students at Canadian universities. A meaningful drop in lucrative international student fees has contributed to the larger crisis of underfunded institutions.
Neither Donald Trump’s paranoid accusations nor the response to international students reflects the larger framework in which Canada welcomes newcomers. Like the 1930s, when nativism and the looming Depression (along with the willingness to imitate the United States) motivated an exclusive immigration regime, these news contexts are a distraction – a pair of red-herring conversations operating in place of a fuller understanding of the country’s appreciation for and fundamental approach to immigration. Inevitably, universities will wait until attitudes shift and the ready stock of good international students can be re-engaged.
My grandfather’s access to Canada in 1930 likely saved his life and that of his immediate family, who waited in Poland for four years while he kept his shoulder to the wheel of the behemoth that was the country’s immigration bureaucracy. If he’d failed in those tough years, I, from the first generation of our family born in Canada, would not be writing this. Immigration, in this sense, is no fever dream but a saving grace.