The Community and the Larger Society

The once-prevalent notion that settlement in a foreign land caused immigrants to become estranged from their culture of origin has been forcefully challenged. Scholars now generally prefer to see immigration as an experience of transplanting, rather than uprooting. They point to the multiplicity of services that immigrants created for themselves and the clusters of urban “villages” that replicated home-town cultures. Oddly enough, their perspective rejoins that of contemporary observers, who considered urban ethnic enclaves to be irretrievably foreign.

The image of an institutionally complete urban village, however, is a snapshot representing one moment in the life of an immigrant community. It conveys an essentially static and hermetically closed reality. Immigrants’ networks of socialization were not confined to the home town or the country of origin, although these remained primary. Urban enclaves were never ethnically homogeneous. Immigrants of different backgrounds interacted with one another, exchanged informal services, and patronized each other’s shops. They were all somehow touched by North American popular and consumer cultures. Although some might resist such innovations, their offspring, who were socialized in the schools, the factories, and the streets, introduced new perspectives and practices into the home. An accommodation between the ways of tradition and those of modernity was reached, at times favouring the parents and at others the children.

What was true of the family was also true of organizational life. Associations introduced the more affluent, more articulate, more idealistic, or more ambitious immigrants to a civic culture that many had not known before. Meetings, agendas, speeches, discussions, and motions became part of their cultural baggage, as familiar as home-town rituals. The involvement of women and youth in associational life broke with traditions that had identified the public sphere with the male head of the household. Public drives, campaigns, petitions, and lobbying extended this civic culture into the community. It mattered little that such organizations fostered traditional objectives or that meetings were conducted in foreign tongues. The form of associational life was distinctly British and North American.

The integration of immigrants was also fostered by the activities of trade unions, professional and economic associations, and mainstream Canadian political parties, which desperately sought to appropriate the “ethnic vote.” And so the reality of immigrant life lies somewhere between uprooting and transplanting. That reality, to pursue the botanical imagery, may be closer to grafting: immigrant communities insert themselves into a Canadian stock from which they draw their sap. The plant that develops may resemble the one from which the scion was originally taken, but the soil and stock from which it springs and which gives it life is different.

There is a widespread assumption among Canadians about the upward mobility of urban immigrants. Such a belief, however, remains untested. In fact, longitudinal studies of mobility patterns within particular immigrant groups across several generations are practically nonexistent in Canada. Until these are available, comparative analyses of the groups’ differing patterns of mobility cannot be developed, and students of Canadian society will be deprived of valuable insights into this fundamental question. A number of years ago, a model of Canadian society as a “vertical mosaic” was developed which contradicted this assumption. The expression sought to highlight rigidities in the social structure that created an ethnic and racial hierarchy in which the British occupied first place, followed successively by northern, eastern, and southern Europeans. French Canadians and members of First Nations found themselves at the bottom. Immigrants and their children, for their part, were kept largely confined to the status of arrival, no matter how long they had resided in Canada.

Such obstacles were discernible historically among non-white immigrants. Blacks, Chinese, South Asians, and others continue to confront rigidities which, although less harsh and obvious than before World War II, are still real. But the concept of a vertical mosaic applied to white immigrants as well, and it gave rise to a lively debate based on analyses of historical and contemporary reality. Studies of nineteenth-century Irish immigration, for example, tried to determine whether Catholics faced particular structural impediments to upward social mobility. The evidence advanced by both sides remains rather fragmentary and inconclusive. It is clear that a great deal more empirical work must be done before the model of a vertical mosaic can be accepted, rejected, or modified.

Despite their dreams of fabulous wealth, few immigrants have gone from rags to riches in their lifetime. Whatever gains were made, whether modest or extravagant, could be easily wiped out by unfavourable market conditions and economic downturns. Still, political or other forms of patronage could enhance an individual’s social mobility. The zeal displayed by Protestant Irish immigrants such as Ogle Gowan in bullying their way into colonial politics emphasized their desire, not only for inclusion in Canadian society, but for a share of the spoils of office. Gowan was not an isolated case; he would be pleased to know that many emulators have come after him. The emergence of new institutions in the mid-nineteenth century, such as the proliferation of Roman Catholic dioceses and the creation of a public system of Catholic education in Ontario, allowed ecclesiastical leaders and school trustees, most of whom were Irish, to promote the interests of their compatriots by awarding them important building and maintenance contracts.

There were also mechanisms within the immigrant group that encouraged individual social mobility. The ability of an earlier immigrant to exploit the needs of later arrivals, especially if these entered the country in large numbers, was one such device. As we have seen, labour recruiters, food provisioners, bankers, and travel agents marketed their services as vital intermediaries between the host society and the newcomers. In this instance, assets such as linguistic skills, literacy, the mastery of some craft, work experience, and capital acquired during the migration process could be tickets to social prominence. In addition, home-town networks were crucial in helping some Chinese, for example, to move from laundering to restaurant ownership in the inter-war years. During this period, the same mechanisms allowed Jews to become entrepreneurs in the needle trades and Italians in the construction industry. These sectors, although highly competitive, did not require a heavy capital outlay, making it possible for some workers to own their own businesses. Home-town links, based on personal contact and mutual trust, aided entrepreneurs in recruiting workers, keeping labour relations fairly smooth, and getting contracts and credit facilities.

Even though most immigrants laboured in a low-wage economy and suffered from sharp, recurring, and more or less protracted downturns, they often experienced an improvement in living standards during their lifetime. They measured this progress by their ability to amass savings, buy property, and provide their children with the education that had been denied to them. For those unable to reach such objectives, emigration to the United States afforded a ready-made alternative, thus reducing the pool of frustrated immigrants. Although times of trouble may have caused some newcomers grief, they provided others with unexpected opportunities. A number of alleged enemy aliens lost their jobs during the two wars, but other immigrants found steady employment in the labour-starved economy. Some of their entrepreneurial compatriots secured lucrative government contracts that solidly established them as businessmen. Similarly, for some the Depression was more a time of retrenchment and did not seriously compromise their essential gains, while others, especially recent immigrants, were condemned to a hand-to-mouth existence.

Jews perhaps offer the most spectacular example of collective social mobility during the Depression. The communities in Montreal and Toronto boasted a large number of entrepreneurs within the immigrant generation itself. The children of newcomers were generally encouraged to pursue higher education, and despite quota systems that restricted their access, they took the universities by storm in the inter-war years. The 1931 census indicates that relative to other ethnic groups, Jews in Quebec were already over-represented in the professions, notably in dentistry, medicine, and law.

But for all immigrants, gains in living standards were realized at tremendous cost to their physical and mental well-being, even though they themselves tended to weigh sacrifices against their long-term accomplishments or, better yet, those of their offspring. Every immigrant community experienced some form of social breakdown, including individual acts of violence, organized crime, deviance, destitution, and mental illness. Nor does the immigrants’ perception of social improvement necessarily conflict with the model of Canadian society as a vertical mosaic. Those at the lower end of the social scale may have been able to achieve relative security, while the position of their group within the social hierarchy remained unaltered.

Many newcomers had the good fortune of arriving during the economic boom that followed World War II. Compared with those who came earlier in the century, the unskilled, comprising a significant proportion of these immigrants, found improved working conditions in this Keynesian era and attained their goals of stability within a relatively short time. Many Italians were able to buy homes within ten years of arrival, while their children took advantage of a rapidly expanding educational system to enhance their prospects. The reforms in collective bargaining, social security, and medical services that characterized this period did not mean that job ghettos, harsh working conditions, and bitter labour disputes were eliminated; such phenomena continued to exist. But the considerable increase in union membership, especially among white-collar employees, had a positive effect on the overall conditions of workers, both unionized and non-unionized.

Meanwhile, the expansion of employment in the public sector provided good jobs to the increased numbers of professionals who arrived either as refugees or as highly trained economic migrants. Intra-ethnic tensions were quite common between post-World-War II immigrants and those who had settled earlier. The newcomers regarded their predecessors as less successful and blamed them for lacking initiative and ambition. The economic recessions that hit Canada hard in the early 1980s and the 1990s perhaps served as a corrective to such hubris. Certainly, recent immigrants have found prospects in the labour market and the benefits of social security much reduced.