Themes In Immigration History

The study of immigration and ethnicity has only recently come into its own in Canada, although its origins go back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The early works in the field were the outcome of the first significant immigration of peoples of neither French nor British origin, who inspired deeply ambivalent feelings in native Canadians. On the one hand, there was a Christian desire to redeem the “strangers within our gates”; on the other, there was a fear that they would contaminate one or the other of the country’s dominant cultures. In the years between the two world wars the leading universities established sociology departments that produced the first academic inquiries in the area. Many of these were serious studies that once again reflected conflicting impulses regarding such immigrants. The older Christian notion of uplift was allied to the newer ambition to organize society more efficiently and make it more productive. Academic interest in ethnicity was reawakened after World War II in the aftermath of another movement of mass migration to Canada. Sociologists were in the forefront of this effort, but historians were also now involved.

In the 1960s the trend was reinforced by the oyal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In its attempt to reconcile the two solitudes while taking into account the contribution of “the others,” the commission generated an enormous amount of research that laid the foundation for the development of immigrant and ethnic studies in the subsequent period. The announcement of the policy of multiculturalism in 1971 heralded an explosion of work in the field involving every branch of the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts.

It would be too ambitious to attempt to analyse the whole of this body of literature. Instead the focus here is on one fundamental aspect of it, historical scholarship. More than multiculturalism, the sudden emergence of social history had a profound impact on Canadian historiography in the 1970s. This new approach put a human face on the anonymous masses who had been largely marginalized by earlier historical writing, as well as providing the concepts and methodologies for historical inquiry in the area of immigration and ethnicity. At present, the field boasts some excellent monographs and collections of essays on particular immigrant groups, some twenty booklets published by the Canadian Historical Association in its series Canada’s Ethnic Groups, and numerous well-researched articles in specialized periodicals, such as Canadian Ethnic Studies, published by the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association. Founded in 1971, this organization provides a forum for interested scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Governments, both federal and provincial, have encouraged such efforts. The federal Multiculturalism Directorate has funded numerous research projects, partially endowed chairs in ethnic studies at several universities across Canada, and subsidized the Generations/ History of Canada’s Peoples series. Provincial money was instrumental in the establishment in 1976 of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, which has collected impressive archival material, held important symposia, and published some of the best work in the field. The Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, created in 1979, encouraged research and publication in, among other areas, immigration and ethnicity. Saskatchewan, for its part, supported the scholarly activities of the ethnic research section of the Canadian Plains Research Centre at the University of Regina. Other provincial governments have made funds available for the study of specific ethnic groups. Not all such initiatives, however, have produced results of high quality. Some in fact were ill-conceived, politically motivated, and wasteful of public resources. But without government support, the development of the field might well have been stunted.