I found an interesting source on the History of Canadian immigration, it's pretty lengthy but fascinating:
Canadian Immigration Legacy
Some interesting quotes I found:
One for our Edmonton friends
"On learning that anti-black sentiment in the newly created state of Oklahoma threatened to drive a large migration of black Americans north to the Edmonton area, the citizens of Alberta's capital mounted a strong protest against Negro immigration. This spurred the Edmonton Municipal Council to pass a resolution urging the federal government to "take all action necessary to prevent the expected influx of Negroes" and the city's Board of Trade to petition the federal government to act immediately to prevent any black people from immigrating into Western Canada."
I'm glad they rescinded this before Elvis Iginla got off the plane.
But I found this quote especially relevant to some of the discussion here:
"The transformation was not without its tensions, however. As has already been noted, public debate raged over the assimilability of those immigrants who spoke an incomprehensible language, who practised a strange religion, and who lacked a grounding in even the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy. The spectacle of bloc settlements in rural areas of the Prairies and the appearance of crowded ethnic ghettos in Canada's rapidly growing cities disturbed most English Canadians; they came to feel that it was their duty to help these foreigners transform themselves into the English Canadian ideal, "making them clean, educated and loyal to the Dominion and to Great Britain."
Sound familar? Applicable to today's situation? The thing is, this was the question that was kicked around from the period of 1896 to 1914. The interesting thing is that it's also in reference to
Ukrainians, not just Asians. Doesn't it sound a lot like what we're all worried about now?
We've had our difficulties and dark moments since then but at the end of the day we seem to have done fine in the century that's past since that.
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