From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Indo-fijians/Norman Buchignani
Indians from Fiji had a history of migration that goes back to the period from 1890 to 1920, when several thousand settled in Australia and New Zealand before those countries banned Indian immigration in 1920. A handful even tried to go to Canada, challenging a similar but earlier ban imposed by the Canadian government. During World War II, many Indo-Fijian and native Fijian sailors in the merchant navy visited Vancouver, and a few Fijian Sikhs immigrated during the late 1940s and 1950s. However, a continuous flow of Indo-Fijian immigrants to Canada began in 1962 and continued throughout the 1960s, with an annual number of immigrants below 3,000.
The motives for immigration have been both economic and political: unemployment, low wages, and limited access to education, compounded in the 1960s and 1970s by concerns about the political fate of Indians in Fiji in the light of an increasingly powerful native nationalist movement and native domination of the government, the police, and the military. In 1975, 2,223 Indo-Fijian immigrants arrived in Canada, bringing the total number of immigrants for the period from 1962 to 1975 to 8,763. One reason for the large increase in numbers was extensive chain migration, that is, immigrants sponsored by family members already settled in Canada. The other reason for the increase was the series of changes in Canadian immigration regulations from 1962 to 1973 that eliminated specific racial, ethnic, and national restrictions, replacing them with economically oriented entry criteria that eventually established a bias towards skilled blue- and white-collar workers. These factors not only increased Indo-Fijian immigration but also led to a certain uniformity among the immigrants. Most were men from a single, thin stratum of Fijian urban families, and employed in skilled or semiskilled trades or white-collar occupations, such as auto mechanics, welding, carpentry, clerical work, bookkeeping, and sales. Over 200 Indo-Fijian auto mechanics had immigrated to Canada by 1980.
Although the desire to immigrate continued to increase after 1975, immigration nevertheless fell to about 500–600 a year thereafter, in part because of an informal restriction on South Asian immigration designed to decrease the backlash against visible minorities. Immigration increased to 744 in 1989 in the aftermath of two successful coups in 1987 led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka of the Fijian Army and the subsequent government’s decisive efforts to reduce further the political power of Fijian Indians. Immigration to Canada jumped to 1,160 in 1990 and 1,593 in 1991. In 1991 182 immigrants were classed as political refugees, and many others were accepted as independents because they were at political risk.
By the end of 1991, 20,090 individuals who listed Fiji as their former country of permanent residence had immigrated officially to Canada. Of these, well over 95 percent were Indo-Fijians, and 52 percent were women. According to the 1991 census, 16,000 Canadians were born in Fiji, but in 1994 the Indo-Fijians’ self-estimate of the size of their community in Canada was approximately 26,000.
In immigration and settlement, Indo-Fijians rely heavily on the support of family and kin. Many borrow from Canadian kin, and, when they arrive in Canada, they usually stay for a while with relatives or friends. Thus, the economic, social, and psychological costs of immigration are relatively low. The reliance on family and kinship networks also leads to continuity in immigration and settlement patterns. Men often immigrate alone, before the rest of their families, in order to lower the economic risks, and women rarely immigrate on their own. Compared with other contemporary immigrant populations, there is a high proportion of young adults among Indo-Fijian immigrants, as well as a large number of family-class or assisted relatives (84 percent in 1988).
Most new immigrants settle in the Vancouver area. It was purely an accident of history that the first Indo-Fijians arrived in Vancouver, but thereafter the settlement pattern has been almost invariable, as relatives come to join family members already located there. According to the 1991 census, 73 percent of Indo-Fijians were resident in British Columbia, 17 percent in Alberta, and 9 percent in Ontario. Even in British Columbia, Indo-Fijians are highly localized. Before 1980 they were concentrated in a small part of East Vancouver, and their subsequent dispersal did not extend significantly beyond the lower mainland region of British Columbia. A small, secondary migration in the 1970s, chiefly to Calgary, established a geographically dispersed community of Indo-Fijians in that city.
