be full of racist tendencies. (Jakubowski in Comack, 1999) In 1945, Canada director of Immigration, A.L. Jolliffe, wrote:“The claim is sometimes made that Canada’s immigration laws reflect class and race discrimination: they do, and necessarily so. Some form of discrimination cannot be avoided if immigration is to be effectively controlled in order to prevent the creation in Canada of expanding non-assailable racial groups.”(Cohen: 1987) Discriminatory immigration laws may appear in many different forms. For example immigration laws may expressly apply only to a particular group. This happened in the case of the Chinese immigration Act. In the last half of the 1800’s Chinese were admitted in large numbers to help work on the railroad. The government encouraged Chinese immigration at this point to do the work that few others would do. Once the railroad was finished however and the need for Chinese workers diminished the government passed the Chinese immigration act (1885). This act put a head tax of $50 a head on all Chinese wishing to enter the country. The opposition to Chinese immigration grew within the country and by 1903 the head tax was $500 a person. In 1923 a new act was put in place the forbid the entry of all Chinese with certain narrow exceptions, Chinese within Canada could not sponsor relatives born in China. This act had a great impact on Chinese immigration between 1923 and 1947 only 44 Chinese immigrants came to Canada legally. (Cohen: 1987)Another example of racist tendencies in immigration came with the Jews and Wartime Immigration policy. During the Second World War thousands of Jews sought refugee from Nazi persecution. Although the government did not actually pass a law not permitting Jews into the country they did execute policies designed to obstruct Jewish immigration. Many of these polices were executed on an informal basis. This memo from the department of External Affairs and Immigrat...
